Schengen -or- Finnish Grammar for Dummies, and by That, I Mean Me

February 16, 2025 ~ Leslie Lanagan ~ Leave a comment

Sometimes life tells you where you want to go, but not before you can silence yourself enough to hear the answers.

The Schengen Area has become my next goal in terms of a passport. I have redirected in terms of options, not final decisions. I have until the end of November to make a final decision, and I have many before me. The Netherlands has a refugee program for trans people, and it is cheap to start a business. Finland is the cheapest option in terms of going to culinary school for free. I believe that Schengen will be more useful later in life if the British apologize.

I am not stuck on any one thing. I am trying to map everything out. I work backwards. The goal is a Finnish passport because it’s so much like Oregon. Any job becomes available to me once I speak Finnish fluently, and I’m on my way for it being day 23. I am finally understanding how verbs work and a few of the ways singular becomes plural. Finnish is so difficult that it takes up my entire brain, and that’s what I like about it. I cannot function on the constant barrage with what’s going on in my country. Laws are changing too fast and if I leave the country, I may not be able to get back in. Trans people are being harassed at the airport and their passports taken. At that point, I shut down:

a dog is a koira, dogs are koirat. Form follows function. A cat is a kissa, cats are kissat.
Romance language grammar sometimes applies. Minä olet is “I am.” Sinä olet is “you are.” Me olemme is “we are.” Ne ovat is “they are.” You can leave out the pronoun if it’s conjugated in the verb.
There is no pronoun…. and I’m crying when I say this…. to indicate the gender of the person speaking.

Hän on is both “he and she is.” The Finnish language is nonbinary.

You cannot legislate hearts and minds on trans issues, so there’s discrimination everywhere. But what Finns will die to protect is human rights. Having a Schengen visa opens me up to being able to live more places, essentially being able to live in Finland whether I have actual Finnish citizenship or not. I do not hate America for what it has done. I am a political science student. I will never not be a political science student interested in both State and CIA, because they do the same job. One is just public, one is just private. I am not as interested in DIA and the military, but not because I don’t like them. I just prefer information to violence because that’s where I’m the most capable.

One of the things that I talked to with Bryn was being secure that I was not offering to be approachable to foreign intelligence agencies because I have any information they’d like to have, unless what kind of cookies my boyfriend used to eat at meetings is burning inside them. He shared nothing, and we’re not together anymore (sadly- we just weren’t going in the right direction together- no harm, no foul).

I said I was approachable on both web sites as a message in a bottle to intelligence agencies that need me because they’re dying to recruit people and trans talent isn’t needed here.

Fuck you, Mr. President.

I’m more of a man than you’ll ever be and more of a woman than you’ll ever get. Choke on it, motherfucker.

But I’m not bitter.

If you’re wondering why I’d curse out the president, it’s because he said he’d grab me by the pussy on a hot mic that was intentional. It wasn’t even locker room talk…. not that it’s excusable. It’s just comprehendable. None of this makes any sense and I am struggling to understand why I should go on in this country. I do not mean in terms of struggling with suicidal ideation. I mean begging for a way out.

Applying to countries that have jobs in the Schengen region is my first choice. Somewhere like Starbucks would have no problem training me in the US and possibly paying for my flight to work in The Netherlands or wherever they operate in the region where the store works in English.

A restaurant would be better in Finland because it’s an easier transition. Terms are all in French. I could work in Viet Nam, I could work in Afghanistan, I could work in Tanzania, I could work in The Phillipines. Doesn’t matter. Cooking is French. Escoffier brought it to Europe and the rest of the West, Ho Chi Minh brought it to Asia and the East.

The problem is that I am really not capable of working in a restaurant, but the lighter load of culinary school fits. It’s an easy A compared to Finnish uni. I’m interested in getting my sword, but uni is cheap and I need a way to work through it. Culinary school is free and I might not. It depends on what happens between now and the end of my lease. I can’t default on it because even though it wouldn’t follow me, it would follow my dad. That’s what happens when you have money and not income.

My mother died. I have some time to rebuild now. I’m using it. I’m being up front because people ask me all the time how I’m living. I have to live rough so my expenses are covered for a number of years, but I’m okay.

I have a possibility of collaborating with others, and we’ll discuss that if and when it happens. Just know that I’m riding the Rainbow Railroad for all it’s worth because trans talent and money is not needed here.

There is a great big correlation between leaving the country and leaving the church. The United Methodists told me for years I was a sinner while taking my money and I didn’t have a choice.

Instead of staying and participating in a system that I have to fight against until I’m black and blue, I want to use it to move into a different system where there is no homelessness and consistent medical care. Prevention is worth an ounce of cure. If you can go to the doctor every time you sneeze wrong, there probably won’t be million dollar surgeries in your future. But you can’t do that in some states when you’re poor. Luckily, mine is not one of them. But my home state is, so that’s not an option unless I just think, “I’ve lost my fucking mind, why not lose it completely?”

As I was telling Phillipa, one of my new writers, “I could buy a house in NE Texas and settle down permanently, but then I’d have to live there.” Of course there would be perks, like immediate access to my family. However, I would lose everything in terms of the social network. The Deep South is not my place anymore, as if it ever was. Maryland’s politics are more in line with Albany than Richmond. Virginia continues to struggle deeply with St. Bob- what a Northern Virginian told me a Southern Virginian calls Robert E. Lee, thus the disconnect in Virginia culture. Maryland is objectively safer for minorities, and home of the greatest intelligence officer who ever lived.

I am not being specific here, because Harriet Tubman, Jonna and Tony Mendez all lived here. Jonna lives in Virginia now, where she’s on the board at the Spy Musem. I’ve met her several times and she’s delightful. We’re not close, but I admire her greatly.

“In True Face” is essential reading if you want to know what happened to Tony after “Argo,” and “The Moscow Rules” is the last book they wrote together. The reason I pick “In True Face” and “Argo” as your introduction to real life intelligence is that you have to be able to pick out Jonna and Tony’s voices separately and you cannot honestly do that until after Tony dies in Jonna’s timeline. I told her that.

Congratulations on owning yourself.

Her lip trembled because she knew what I meant. It was the second time I’d made her cry, and I’ve written about the first time so much that I don’t need to tell it again. I have felt those emotions and they don’t dissipate with each writing. It’s an experience I’ll remember forever because it changed the direction in which I wanted to go.

Jonna decided to go to a wedding in Europe, and that was all it took. She was a citizen of the world who had the fortunate and unfortunate experience of loving two intelligence officers. The only reason I say it is unfortunate is that she had to learn how to hang quickly, and as you read it’s a different kind of love. It’s harder to watch someone else going through a thing than it is to go through a thing. It’s easier when you’re both going through a thing at once.

It’s not a trope that spies date each other. It’s reality because they never leave the office because they can’t.

They’re as trapped as line cooks during a shift, and the reality is that cooks are often messengers for intelligence and waitresses are the silent witnesses that listen to everything. No one cares if a female waitress is listening, so waitresses are often spies in a uniform and people don’t notice.

Social masking is everything. Intelligence is nothing more than a small stage, which you will learn by rote as I did if you get into the rabbit hole of Jonna and Tony’s voices. I don’t enjoy the idea of doing these things. I enjoy the idea of hearing these things. All I do is talk to people on the Internet. It doesn’t matter where they’re from. If they’re not extremists with an agenda, I’m all in.

I just realized that I should rephrase in terms of being willing to work for allies. Fuck Mossad and IDF. They’re more powerful than Palestine and have held it over their heads. Palestine gets the jump on them one time and it’s excuse for resettlement and make no mistake it could turn into genocide quickly if Netanyahu all of the sudden decides he wants their resettlement land, too. There’s no guarantee the Americans would not support him in this now.

American Jews and Evangelicals are responsible for a lot of this and I am not being antisemitic. I am being political. The Christians and the Jews have decided that the Muslims don’t have a book that’s valid, only they do. Therefore, money is being piped into Israel at a rate that is unsustainable to ever make, much less keep, Palestine sovereign.

But Mormonism and Scientology check out? Please.

The reason Americans are so racist is that you don’t hear about modern Muslims in the news. You hear about terrorists. My answer is a big fat “I Will Walk With You,” the Twitter campaign that took off and made me proud to be an ally…. and “Muslims Report Stuff” completes me.

But the thing is, I’ve been ecumenical since I was born, hungry for information about all religions and not just mine. I have even watched documentaries on Mormonism and not just from escapees. I wanted to understand doctrine because if you’re going to ridicule something, you have to know it cold. I would believe that the Mormon episode of South Park took an enormous amount of research or an all call to the jack Mormons everyone knew in the writer’s room.

I do not ridicule religions that make you better. I ridicule cults because they do not focus on self improvement. They focus on glorification. Religion is not responsible nor helpful unless it begins from the perspective of “every problem begins with me.” I have no qualms about accepting the consequences of my actions as long as I’m allowed to have them. I do not want to be forced into reading minds again, because that is the essence of learning to manage high functioning autism. It is balancing the expectations in other people’s minds versus a very real dysfunction in managing energy.

It is never “dumber” vs. “smarter” with high functioning autism. It is how well you can fit into society. It is how well you can manage your own energy in the face of needing and wanting more space. When Aaron and I move in together, I want a house with a lot of space that neither one of us have to manage. It is not bougie, it is reality. We need help and hiring it out is the one problem that money solves with autism.

In other countries, this neurological difference is recognized (even here, in some states) and you have a social worker to manage these things for you- like a nurse to administer medication and home help.

I’m not old. I’m 47.

This doesn’t make autism less difficult, and I need people to recognize that I am not bitching about problems, but working on solutions. I am tired of having to fight for things like:

a service dog to counterbalance my weight
an assistant or social worker to manage my bills and house
the right people to live with me and help take care of me as I take care of them.

I am tired of fighting for a life of interdependence when Europeans already do things that way. In Finland, you have no choice. In that climate, you bond through those hard activities. You help your neighbor first, because Finns have to recognize that you’re willing to put in the work to maintain a friendship before they give it. That doesn’t mean buying them a present. That means getting in the snow and helping them dig. Philippa, Aaron, Bryn, and I are all interested in spending time there, as is my friend Aaron B. As in, Bryn and AB might not want to move, but they’re not frightened by snow and would love a Finnish vacation once in a while.

I told everyone in my Finnish discussion group (we’re all learners, so it’s mostly English… I am not this advanced) that I was learning Finnish because of the culture surrounding language, not because I cannot get by in English just fine. I’m also a writer, so understanding the rules of grammar is essential. One day I’d like to be able to publish in that language, and I’m on a bit of a deadline.

I’m not going to make it, and that’s okay.

My route to the YKI is long and winding, but it’s definitely what gets me up in the morning. I have a ton of Finnish friends, but none of them have anything to do with this.

It’s that over time, I realized that living in Skyrim was indeed possible.

Suomessa siitä on helppo päästää irti, koska se on jo jäätynyt

February 13, 2025 ~ Leslie Lanagan ~ Leave a comment

Daily writing prompt

What were your parents doing at your age?

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I have monetized WordPress for all my writers, and we’re discussing how to profit-share. My two ideas are to pay out their money as it comes in, or if they’ll let me have their money while we’re still making pennies, then I will pay them in technology. A lot of my writers are as poor as me, so Aaron, Bryn, and I all need Macs. I now worship at the church of Steve for two reasons:

I speak Finnish now. Finnish is cool.
- I’m on about Day 22, and I have busted my ass to the tune of being at the top of the sapphire league and the February challenge is already done. I am also not ready to live out my life in the United States at this point and deserve a Finnish passport. I came out as nonbinary and then found out it falls under the trans umbrella. I cannot change my gender on my passport from F to X and that is not acceptable to me. I am freaking out with PTSD because of it, thus learning the hardest language in the world. Macs are the only desktops that have long press on keys so that tama becomes tuo. It’s not this, it’s that. “This” is tamä, “that” is tuo. The title is “Letting Go in Finland is Easy, Because It’s Already Frozen.” I used Google translate because I don’t want to have to type all those special characters and it’s day 22.
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Here’s the FAQ:

How are you going to deal with all that snow and ice?

Like everyone else. You plan. I have synthetic Reebok long johns and UltraTech from Uniqlo as well. If I need it, I will upgrade to Merino wool. I just want to get to Finland first before I bite the bullet. Clothes for that climate aren’t cheap, and you pay it. If necessary, I will get animal furs for my shell, but I have a great midweight from Uniqlo as well. My shell depends on how cold it is. In Finland, I might be able to find a good synthetic, but if not, I have no qualms about buying animal skins for that climate. There’s a time and place for it. I don’t take any crap. I am doing synthetics first, therefore I am giving my best effort to be kind to animals. Please do not think I am cruel to animals when it is 30 below.

I am sure that Aleksi, Dave, Cat, Carola, Phillipa, and Cyril will have lots of tips. I just bought a subscription to Aleksi because if you pay money you can talk to him. I want to do the same for Dave, because I don’t think Cyril has enough fans yet to be monetized. He deserves it, though. That’s because his videos are sometimes informational about Vami (it’s a vocational school, which is where I’m interested in hotel and restaurant management. It’s in Vaasa, which is why I’m also on day one of Swedish. I haven’t stuck with it as of yet, because when you choose a language, you stick with it. If I had started Swedish first, I would have stuck with it because the language support is better on Duolingo (it has an AI that can judge your pronunciation. Finnish don’t.). That being said, Swedish is useless for anything but the YKI-testi. Something like 93% speak Finnish, and Swedish being an official language is a throwback because Finland used to belong to the Kingdom of Sweden. Also, it’s cold. But I work on the Internet. Realistically, how much time am I going to spend in the snow vs. watching it?

How are you going to deal with the dark?

I don’t know, but Portland prepared me pretty well. The climate is not all that different from Portland in terms of the sky. It’s dark in the middle of the day in Portland, too. Rain, etc. Katya (my closest Finnish friend) says that I will not understand how dramatically dark it gets until I get there. I’m planning a trip soon to scout out schools in Tampere, Helsinki, and Vaasa. Since culinary school will be a lot of walking, again, I don’t care. You are fabulously warm when you create the proper microclimate, and when it gets REALLY cold, they have the same American hand warmers that we do. I put one in my jacket pocket to absorb into my coat, and I’d be fine in very cold weather. The Finns don’t have to teach you how to get used to the cold. They have to teach you how to layer so that inside your clothes, it’s in the 70s.

They can make you warm enough to faint, as I often do if I’m wearing my winter gear inside.

Why do you want to move across the world? Why Finland and not Mexico since you already speak a little Spanish and it’s a romance language, which is like a hundred times easier?

You have to learn Finnish in a lake so no one can see you cry. I stole that line, but I feel attacked. Yet there is something about Finland that drives me crazy, and that’s the wanderlust to be outside in the summer again without having to revisit the trauma of Portland. I also don’t like it when it’s 110 degrees in the summer. The thing I liked about Portland was that it was tolerable inside the house most days. In Portland, only new construction has air conditioning and you live in one room in the summer- because generally you can only afford one window box if you insist on being a cook. You don’t become a cook if you can do anything else. The neurotypical workflow of an office drives me batshit insane, so I want to learn Finnish cuisine as I’m building LMG. Hopefully, by the time I graduate I’ll be able to support myself on American money…. which I need a lot of in order to qualify for a visa.

Paolo the Accountant says I don’t have enough money to go to Europe and even that doesn’t daunt me. This is because America never gave me a choice. I am begging for money from the whole world and it makes me ashamed because I hate asking for help when it’s a gift I cannot possibly pay back.

But what I need you to know is that I’m The Doctor, and I’m at my last regeneration. I need you to let me have them infinitely.

What were my parents doing at my age?

Living the American dream that I’ll never have due to the United States’ dedication to the idea that I’m not a person. I’m even approachable by foreign intelligence agencies because even though I’ve dated an American intelligence officer, I don’t know anything. I just mean that it would be fun to work for the Finns in intelligence, like a translator or in the mailroom. Being fluent in Finnish doesn’t come all at once, but I’m working as hard as I can. It will take about four years to be fluent, and all of my Facebook groups in Finland will back me up on that. One of the huge problems with Finnish is that I cannot really practice until I get there. The way people speak Finnish and the way they write it is often very different.

I said “kippis” to Katya one day, meaning “have a good day, cheers.” She said that’s for shots. Of course it is.

Katya reached out to me a propos of nothing. My love of Finland is encapsulated in her because we are not romantic partners. She’s kind of my grandma, kind of my mom, kind of Supergrover, kind of Bryn. It would make me happy for us to be neighbors, because older people are lonely…. in Baltimore and in Finland.

I actually am involved with someone casually, but we are planning a future together. He is not opposed to living anywhere in Finland because he’s in Minneapolis currently. We need a vacation in Helsinki for him to warm up this time of year…. He’s also given me fantastic advice on caring for my outer shell (wool sweater and waterproof pants). That the fibers in wool can be tightened and softened with… wait for it… hair conditioner. Of course it can. It’s always something simple and hair tracks.

Aaron is quite a bit younger than me, but it’s not a case of that kind of attraction. He’s adorable, but that’s not what drew me to him. He’s a Lutheran (Missouri Synod) preacher’s kid and an atheist who believes in the same kind of social justice that I do. I’m the Rowan Williams to his Christopher Hitchens. I know Hitch is dead, but Aaron’s smarter. He doesn’t have to work very hard to impress me. He’s been to seminary (didn’t graduate) and I haven’t. Therefore, he was able to tell me what books to read to learn about Jesus, because he was indeed a real person.

At that point, if the virgin birth and the resurrection never happened, does that negate what he taught?

It does to Evangelicals, because they don’t study what he taught, anyway.

Luckily, my dad is not one of them, but at my age he transitioned from being a United Methodist minister to a medical assistant to my stepmother; so did I, in a sense. I am ordained now in the Church of the Latter Day Dude. I was just the go-to for everything as a kid, my dad’s Girl Friday.

As his American dream came together, mine fell apart. I folded at Matthew Shepard’s death, September 11th, January 6th, and now we’ve been taken over by a South African dictator.

If you’re not on board by now….

Bye Felicia.

Bye.

Cops caused my worst trip

December 12, 2024 ~ Riker Brown ~ 1 Comment

30 years ago today, the Police and School District did more damage to me by kicking me out of school for having LSD than all of LSD I’ve taken since then ever has. It socially isolated me preventing me from forming meaningful peer connections in my first year of high school, and despite night classes and correspondence courses I was not allowed to take enough credits to start my second year as a full sophomore putting me behind academically. If it hadn’t been for the fact that I was “previously a good kid” (read I was white and daddy got a lawyer) I would have also been denied the credits for the semester I was a week from completing at the time because “Zero Tollerance”.

Since then, the use of hallucinogens has given me insights into myself and the world that I don’t know I’d have found otherwise, and even helped me overcome past emotional trauma. They’re not for everyone, but they’ve helped me.

I’m not saying there shouldn’t have been consequences for not paying attention to set and setting, but they were certainly disproportionate

It’s past time to rethink drug policy.

This Machine

November 8, 2024November 8, 2024 ~ Riker Brown ~ Leave a comment

The first defense is art and song

Against the ever present throng

Of the hateful and their blight

Their golden calf, their crystal night.

Those with privilege must stand tall

To help those who would face the call

Of extinction by the powers

Day by day, hour by hour

When the threat of fascists reigns

Everyone will feel the pain

You think youre safe if not your brother,

But someday too youll be the other.

When there’s noome left to blame

They’ll come for you, just the same.

The vote you cast to prop them up

Youll find one day wont be enough.

So stand up now, and be the change

To keep safe for all deemed strange.

Protect those now who need a hand.

For peace and justice take a stand.

The Resistance begins.

November 6, 2024 ~ Riker Brown ~ Leave a comment

The artists are the first line of defense. We draw the eyes to keep them off the rest of the movement, and let the frightened know they are not alone.

On my own polytheism.

October 26, 2024October 26, 2024 ~ Riker Brown ~ Leave a comment

Why am I a polytheist?

Because Odin teaches me to have wisdom.

Because Thor gives me strength.

Because Loki tells me when I need to change.

Because Tyr reminds me to be fair and just.

Because Jesus shows me how to love others.

Because The Dude gives me permission to take it easy.

This is Not an Entry

October 16, 2024 ~ Leslie Lanagan ~ Leave a comment

This article is getting a lot of attention on Medium (10 claps when I’ve been on Medium two months is not nothing. If it resonates with 10, it will resonate with more). I’m opening it up from the paywall because it’s popular in the autistic category. I hope you’ll consider buying Medium, because as I joked on Facebook earlier, “I’m on Medium and I’ve gotten more followers because what I haven’t known for 25 years is that my readers prefer audio.” No one has to record my entries for me, I just have to be careful with punctuation so that it sounds the way I wrote it. Also pretty hilarious to hear an AI swear as much as I do. 😉

It’s called “A Certain Kind of Person.”

And by that I mean autistic.

A Letter from the Editor

October 14, 2024 ~ Leslie Lanagan ~ Leave a comment

This will be posted later on Medium, but my real fans get it first.

1265 Download

I’m not different. I’m just different.

October 2, 2024October 1, 2024 ~ Riker Brown ~ Leave a comment

Riker Brown is new to the writing world, and is just now getting their feet wet. Their odd outlook on the world gives them insights that may not be evident to others. They hope to share those outlooks and idiosyncracies in a way that brings just the right balance of wonder and weird.

I posit that neurodivergence isn’t a thing in the natural world, and it only exists because society is built for a narrow, homogenous subset of the population. Anyone who can’t survive in such a society has to be pathologized so they can be the problem instead of our neo-feudal capitalist hellscape.

It’s not neurodivergence. It’s neurodifference because there is no neurotypical.

A Letter From the Editor

September 15, 2024 ~ Leslie Lanagan ~ Leave a comment

The reason that I have moved to Medium is that I cannot make money on WordPress. That will change, because when my ad money reaches the threshold on Medium that it can pay for a professional WordPress account, I will monetize here, too. That’s because a professional WordPress account is only a hundred dollars a year, it’s just not as lucrative for writers as joining Medium. However, I feel differently about it now because @animebirder, @one4paws, @bookerybones, @aaronbrown8cc63b4e5d4, and I all have such unique voices that I either want them on Medium with me, or I want to be here with them. It’s just getting enough ad money to be able to do that in the first place. If you are a Medium subscriber, I make more when you read. Claps are great, but they really don’t pay for anything. What pays is the amount of time you spend on the site.

I am lucky enough to have posted enough to get money this month, which is incredible. I just don’t know how much. That’s because they don’t send you money until you hit a certain threshold, and I almost had enough in August. By October, I’ll have my first real, sustainable income as a writer. I do not want anyone to think of this as a get rich quick scheme, because it is, absolutely…….

One that I could not do if I didn’t have 25 years’ worth of entries already banked.

So, it’s introducing new people to my old work, and introducing new writers that like to talk to each other. We have a group chat that has become an infodump channel, and it’s time to start specializing. That’s because not all of my writers are working for “Stories.” My buddy Evan and I are writing a cookbook. It remains to be seen whether we’ll collaborate online or in person, but either way, we’re writing a book.

The way I see it is that for the next four years, my life is covered as long as I live very simply. That will definitely give me the time to see if a neurodivergent media company is viable. I am learning that I know more than I think I do, because I did not know how boundaries worked. I have constantly treated them like they are others’ guidelines to make. My world has flipped now that I’m in charge of making things happen, and I am lost in the details. The best thing that my mother could have done for me post-mortem is allow me to work on this project, because as of right now, living off of it is the only thing I can do. When the state of MD finds out about the money, I will not have access to Medicaid Expansion or any of the other social services I’ll need to get diagnosed with autism. I diagnosed myself and honestly wouldn’t bother to go to the doctor if it wasn’t helpful to my career. Like, autism diagnoses are so expensive and we’ve all been white knuckling it this long, so why bother?

If I ever have to join another corporate system, I want autistic accommodations because starting a new job without them is setting me up to fail every single time. If you’re a neurodivergent adult who struggles in the system, my guess is that you died inside a little bit at “I have an extensive collection of nametags and hairnets.” Autistic people don’t have problems getting jobs. They have problems keeping them. If you’re autistic, you’re going to excel at government work because they’re going to accommodate you the most. For instance, me being a file clerk or a secretary at Langley was never about working with spies, but getting accepted into a job I could actually do with full government salary and pension. I would love to do menial tasks for CIA because then on my off time, I’d truly be left to my own devices to write. I am also very good at making connections, so I can be just as good a writer overhearing someone’s patois in the mail room as I would being in operations and doing the scary shit myself. The whole point is that my ADHD personality would be thrilled and my autistic personality would want to shoot me. My autistic nature CANNOT handle traveling that much. I am so bad at transitions that I just couldn’t deal. Of course it would be fun to be James Bond, but my body just wants to read about being cool. It doesn’t actually want me to be cool

Right now, everything is in flux as we’re deciding what to do. “Stories” will be rebranded as Gravity’s Rainbow to be more inclusive, but we’re still working on both a full and minimalist logo based on Thomas Pynchon. I want it to represent the energy of a bomb going off inside you. That the arc of every spiritual journey is realizing you are the cause of your own suffering and start to self-actualize.

This space is free, but I hope that one day…. just maybe……

all your base are belong to us

because

somebody set us up the bomb.

There and Back Again, Day Two: Bingenheimer Ried / Alkmaar

September 12, 2024September 13, 2024 ~ Carlos/Giancarla Ross ~ Leave a comment

(September 12, 2023: Echzell, Hesse, Germany to Alkmaar, Noord-Holland, Netherlands)

I packed up my things long before dawn. By four-thirty, I was on the S-Bahn into Frankfurt, and by six, I was on a different S-Bahn train headed north into the Hessian countryside. Dawn began to break as I waited for yet another transfer at Friedberg, with enough time to grab a quick breakfast at the station Bäckerei. By seven-thirty, I’d made my destination, a single platform station in butt-ass-nowhere, called Reichelsheim (Wetterau), a tidy collection of brick houses, and a few slightly newer modern-ish box homes clustered around a REWE supermarket, a smaller Netto Marken-Discount, and damn near nothing else.

It’s the kind of place that would have a Chicken Express, an A&W/Dairy Queen, and fifteen churches if it were in Texas, but this definitely wasn’t Texas. No live oaks whatsoever, instead, the forested Taunus Mountains remained visible on the far side of Friedberg well to the west, and the landscape immediately leaving town opens up into green, gently rolling farmland.

A footpath northeastbound follows the S-Bahn track toward a depression in the north, a wetland complex called Bingenheimer Ried. Before even leaving town, Graylag Geese (Graugans), svelte and free-flying unlike the tubby domestic monstrosities we see in America, honked overhead, joined by other waterfowl – including, to my amusement, introduced Canada Geese (Kanadagans) and Egyptian Geese (Nilgans) which are familiar from my travels in America.

A low, artificial rise adjacent to a tool shed gave me my first good look over the wetlands, and also revealed a decent-sized observation tower to the north. While Enkheimer Ried had been nice and productive, there was no birding-specific infrastructure there, whereas there were clearly purpose-built observation decks at Bingenheimer Ried. Maybe if I was lucky, there’d be other birders present, hopefully not too many, though.

Rare birds can draw in surprising crowds: in America, the first chaseable Spotted Rail drew in dozens, if not hundreds of birders to Choke Canyon Park, tucked away in the whole-lotta-nothing between Corpus Christi and San Antonio. A whole peninsula lined with telescopes and long-lens cameras, all looking for one ungainly, if striking waterbird that had strayed there from Central America. In Britain and Japan, I’ve seen social media photos with huge groups all straining to photograph a single stray from America.

Here, there was a continuing record of a shorebird that would have made more sense to see along the Caspian Sea than a Hessian wetland: a Black-winged Pratincole, with a real doozy of a name in German: Schwarzflügelbrachschwalbe … YIKES! Pratincoles are much less well known than sandpipers or plovers since they don’t range in America at all, but they’re streamlined open-country birds (“shorebirds” being a generalized term referring to a group of related birds rather than an absolute label of behavior or habitat) which feed aerially on insects.

Given that my itinerary wasn’t intended to take me remotely close to the Caspian, I had to give this one a try.

I stroll over to the wooden observation tower, and there are a few people already there but it’s not crowded at all. The telescopes are out, which is good because the main wetland is a good hundred yards out.

Even with eight-power binoculars, it’s easy to see why this place is a birder’s dream. White Stork (helpfully, Weißstorch) forage in the shallows. Wheeling flocks of black-and-white Northern Lapwings (Kiebitz) distract us from time to time with their chatter (ah, yes, kibitzing). Any number of marsh birds and songbirds and crows and the occasional raptor. Still, not yet The Bird.

At some point, they asked where I parked my car. “Oh, I took the train from Frankfurt.” It takes about an hour before they are like, oh, you’re not an immigrant living in Frankfurt who’s so acclimated you’re a birder. I switch to English. “Nope, just landed here from Texas yesterday.” I switched briefly to my first ex-family’s Wichita Falls drawl for comedic effect, and, well, I’m Filipino, so hearing the Hank Hill Voice coming out of my mouth is nearly as much vocal dissonance as, well, me speaking German. Mirthful laughter and I’m a stranger no more.

Turns out at least one of them had been to Texas to see Whooping Cranes, as I have in years past! Birders will be birders: we are a tribe that transcends national origin and common language, and we chase the same legends and listen to the same grapevine. I’d gotten my info from a German living in Belgium before double-checking on eBird. (Note: we’ll get to Dirk in a couple days. He’s awesome.)

Fifty-odd species later (and I’d like to note that this would be a really great list for a single location in Texas, which is right there with California in “you are a spoiled dadgum birder” terms), and we’re still scanning, and it’s getting close to nine and I really need to start considering heading back to the train, rarity or not, if I’m going to make it to my next hostel by nightfall.

Cause this is a side trip, folks. This wasn’t even part of The Itinerary, this was a target of opportunity. And right about when I thought my window was closing, There It Was.

Black wings. Forked tail. Black necklace. Too streamlined for a plover, too chunky to be a tern, sitting pretty on a sandbar. The Schwarzflügelbrachschwalbe (and, nobody was yelling this word like the KRANKENWAGEN meme because not even the Germans were going to consider that) was ours, with high-fives and smiles all around. No, I would not have to save this bird for some far-future pie-in-the-sky trip along the Silk Road. Mind you, I do want to visit the Silk Road, but that’s realistically not happening on a social services coordinator budget.

Well, not like this was realistic on non-profit salary either, and yet here I was, in the middle of a bunch of German birders, celebrating a life bird that makes literally zero sense for an Austinite to expect before retirement age.

Too soon, I had to take my leave, because I had a full birding day booked for the very next day … nearly three hundred miles northwest. And I wasn’t flying.

You see, today wasn’t originally intended to be a birding day, this was a transit day and I’d added two more steps to my whirlwind.

From Reichenheim (Wetterau), S-Bahn local train to Friedberg. Switch onto the S-Bahn back to Frankfurt (Main) central station. And then it would be time to switch to a train towards Düsseldorf, but for a transfer coming in Cologne (Köln).

The original plan had been to take slower trains along the Rhine Valley and check out the Lorelei, that fabled hill upon the Rhine below which the mermaids would lure travelers to some romantically dreadful fate, but there was absolutely no time for that now that I’d burned that on getting a much larger net haul of bird species off the beaten path. Nope, it was time to switch to an ICE train …

And by eleven, that very ICE train was now on the tracks between the Frankfurt main station and airport stops, doing absolutely nothing for half an hour. Finally, an appropriately snarky voice came over the PA, first in German, then in English, both with the same tired, passive-aggressive vocal affect. The other passengers started chuckling.

“Welcome to the ICE train to Düsseldorf. We will be forty-five minutes late to Köln, and we will not be stopping in Düsseldorf. Thank you for riding Deutsche Bahn.”

German. Efficiency. The conductor’s irritation was palpable. Evidently, my rides on the local S-Bahn trains, five in a row all on time without incident, were an utter anomaly, and this was closer to the expectation. No matter, because it makes little sense to worry about what is out of my control, and when in doubt, you pivot!

It wasn’t long before we got rolling, and not much longer beyond that we were screaming through the foothills of the Taunus at 150mph. Now we’re cooking. Forests and farms and the occasional town out the windows, my lifer Red Kite (Rotmilan) seen soaring high overhead (birding from high-speed trains being a skill I learned was indeed feasible on multiple trips along the even faster Tokaido and San’yo Shinkansen lines).

Before too long, the train slowed and farmland gave way to urbanity again, and the spire of Cologne Cathedral loomed across the river. There was my transfer, half an hour before my next ICE train, enough time to check out the cathedral and grab a currywurst,

Just then, a pretty young lady started speaking to me in English. I was caught off guard, so I instinctively replied in English – and immediately realized my mistake. She started in on her sob story about how she was from Afghanistan and needed money and I immediately just walked off because I needed a restroom, I needed some currywurst, and I absolutely did not have time for panhandlers and pickpockets and hell no, not gonna be a mark today.

This may sound callous, but let’s be real: solo travelers abroad are targets, especially Americans, because, whether or not you think you have money (and by American standards, I don’t), you still look like you have money. Even being a paycheck-to-paycheck American means you are a one-percenter by most standards.

Fortunately, I know exactly where to go. Polizei. Duh.

I wasn’t going to trouble myself by turning her in, obviously, because, for all I knew, she was really in need, but she wasn’t going to press the matter in front of the cops, and if she had any accomplices, they would be wise to disappear right the hell then.

More to the point, I didn’t have the damn time, because my bladder was going to bust. Nice coincidence, there’s the bathroom, right next to the Polizei, time to get a euro coin (blargh), and oh hey, currywurst at Le Crobag, let’s effing go.

I was so hypervigilant getting to that Amsterdam ICE train that I failed to get decent shots of the cathedral and I didn’t even remember to tuck into my currywurst until my train was nearly halfway to the Dutch border, sailing through Monchengladbach. The sandwich was still pristine. European breads are wizardry.

The countryside gets progressively flatter as you transition from Germany to the Netherlands, hammering home why people call Benelux “the Low Countries”. It can’t be overstated: the flatness of the Netherlands makes Texas look positively Himalayan. What the Netherlands lacks in topography, though, it more than makes up for in both rural charisma and, weirdly enough, urban squalor.

The ICE train announcement as you reach Utrecht is particularly dire. “Please be aware of pickpockets at all times, there is high pickpocket activity in Utrecht and Amsterdam.” Really, that would have been friendly to mention before, I dunno, COLOGNE? Eindhoven seemed clean and modern enough, but Amsterdam-Zentraal, our next transfer, was …

… yeah, we weren’t going to actually be staying in Amsterdam on this trip, because we still had more train travel to go.

Fortunately for my purposes, the warm cloudy day had become a blustery, rainy afternoon, and the transfer to the local Dutch train was rather uneventful except that I had managed to catch the commuter train with all the students on board going home for the evening.

Now. I can get by in German, and I’m a native speaker of American English. Logically, the Netherlands being geographically and linguistically between these two countries, I should be fine with Dutch, right And you would be absolutely wrong because Dutch is as incomprehensible to me as Quenya or Simlish. You’d conversely maybe think I’d find it awkward and strange, but actually, no, Dutch is a complete and utter delight to listen to.

If there was one word to describe it?

Lekker. The Dutch language is totally lekker.

I’m not being sarcastic: this was literally the word I heard the most on that train ride toward Den Helder.

Also: these folks hold on to their terminal Rs like they’re life preservers in the North Sea, for some reason the Amsterdam dialect sounds almost exactly like a Texas drawl, and I’ll be damned if “valley girl affect” isn’t the goddamn same in Dutch as it is in English.

(In completely unrelated news, if any of you knows or is a polyamorous Dutch girl and happens to be even remotely interested in dating a slightly over-the-hill but adventurous and affectionate non-binary Filipino-American …)

It was stormy by the time I got to Alkmaar, but still early enough (mid-afternoon) that I had time to explore a bit after checking into the hostel.

Alkmaar is sort of a mini-Amsterdam, a canal city with houseboats, but without the urban blight and overcrowding. Instead: a quaint square with the largest cheese market in all of the Netherlands. It looks like a church spire, but I promise you, that is a shrine to cheese. This should be terrifying to me, since I’m lactose intolerant, except that not once in Europe was this ever a problem. A mystery for the ages. (And thankfully not a reenacted movie scene across the table from Kevin Kline!) Across the canal, there was a friendly dude hawking stoofvlees, an irresistible (and actually Flemish) concoction of rich beef stew over fried potatoes, something like an Old World cousin of poutine.

(I still have dreams about all this food a year later.)

The storms had receded into herringbone clouds, and the sun peeked through again as I enjoyed dinner in Alkmaar. Black-headed Gulls (kokmeeuw) wheeled overhead waiting for pedestrians to drop tasty morsels; a wild-coiffured Great Crested Grebe (grote kuiffuut) bobbed in the water looking like the bird equivalent of a System of a Down roadie.

Tomorrow would be a whole day of birding, and all I had to do was check in …

And I returned to the hostel to find a rather snotty young Australian woman in yoga pants at the desk screaming. Evidently she’d self-extended her stay without telling anyone and so my stuff was now strewn outside the room, and her stuff was all over the fucking place and she had evidently thrown a completely shitfit which the flustered hostel manager was trying desperately to manage. After she calmed down, presumably unwadded her pantaloons, and vacated, the manager got me my own room for being so polite and patient and for helping him calm down. (I’m ex-Disney. I know this shit happens, and I know how hard it is to stay professional when it does.)

And look, people have bad days, even when they’re supposed to be having the time of their lives. It’s not a national thing, a cultural thing, or a gendered thing. I’ve had remarkably bad days, in public, during travel, with others around to hold the receipts. So, I’m not going to blame her either. I hope her yoga got her to a better headspace that day.

As for the receptionist, I noticed he was also serving as a barista. A real Dutch coffee, please. (Every country does better coffee than America, I swear.) Over that much-better-coffee-than-Starbucks, I take the opportunity to ask the receptionist-slash-barista what his real opinions about Americans are, and he levels with me that, nowadays, the “ugly Americans” don’t leave their country, and it’s actually the Aussies and Kiwis out of the English-speakers who cause trouble (this earned an eyebrow, but I was frankly thinking this was recency bias), but not even a fraction of the trouble of Mainlander Chinese who don’t queue up, never learn local languages, leave trash everywhere …

Y’all, I’m fully a quarter Fujianese by DNA — that fraction of my ancestors lived in the kind of circular fortress-towns you’d half-expect to see in a wuxia film or a Mulan remake.

But also, from Kyoto to San Antonio, I can kinda personally vouch, because the Venn diagram of “coming from a culture that considers itself the center of the world” plus “nouveau riche with no fucking manners” is going to suck no matter what ethnicity or nationality that Venn diagram comes from, and Mainland China is precisely where that junction of recently prosperous, deeply self-centered people with no common sense is on the ascendant right now.

Dude was also keenly observant on the other point: the stereotypical Ugly Americans would never leave their homes nowadays because they’re too busy believing what they’re told, that everywhere else is a shithole. Or, in the words of a particularly toxic influence long since yeeted from my life: “Why would you ever leave America when everything you could ever want is already here?” (Yeah, double middle-fingers to that person. Not one bit sorry.)

More world for me to enjoy, anyhow.

I gave myself time afterward to really enjoy a quiet evening in Alkmaar, because tomorrow would be a very busy, all-day birding trip to the North Sea island of Texel, and this was perfect — I certainly didn’t feel overwhelmed like I would have in Amsterdam. I walked past a Hawaii Restaurant whose menu was zero percent Hawaii, but those burgers would’ve been great if I wasn’t literally from where burgers are like The Most Basic Restaurant Food. So I ended up with spareribs (helpfully labeled “spareribs“, with a choice of “traditioneel” or “spicy“) at a place called De Waag (because it’s the Netherlands and their double vowels deserve at least half a dozen appearances in this blog entry), and then got myself a pretty good night’s sleep in anticipation of another early morning.

All in all, a very unexpected and high-productive side-trip, a damn-near u-turn, and my second new country in as many days. Right on.

There and Back Again, Day One: Enkheimer Ried

September 12, 2024September 12, 2024 ~ Carlos/Giancarla Ross ~ Leave a comment

(September 11, 2023: Frankfurt am Main)

It only takes a few minutes on the increasingly crowded S-Bahn to get from Gateway Gardens to the Frankfurt (Main) Hauptbahnhof, as the woods around the airport give way quickly to suburbs, then you cross the river Main and you are surrounded by all the accoutrements of big European cities — the old European architecture mashed in with tall glass skyscrapers, railyards full of graffiti, lots and lots of little Achtung! signs warning of rail hazards, and then you have arrived at your rail hub, tons and tons of people going to and fro and much more racially diverse than some people in the States (who have never set foot here) would have you believe.

I peeked out a bit to get my bearings, but my goal for the day wasn’t the city center, but a transfer to the U-Bahn, and thence to the eastern suburb of Bergen-Enkheim.

I love public transit so much. Even the single train line at home in Austin means I get to skip out on 45 minutes of stressful freeway gridlock, and I don’t mind the additional walking from station to work because it means I don’t have to set aside extra time for the equivalent amount of exercise. Gyms bore me; long walks don’t, especially when there are flowers to photograph for iNaturalist, public art to go on Instagram, and joggers and cyclists to greet.

Extra points, though, when that long walk gives you time to acclimate to entirely new surroundings across the ocean.

The moment I stepped out of the train and started eastbound on a street called Leuchte, I knew damn well this was Texas. Business with names like “Best Döneria” and “China-Thai-Snack”, tucked into quaint, freshly-painted buildings that nevertheless feel like they were surely there before Texas was a republic. While not as vertical as Japan, the residential zones here are still much more communal than in America; no single-story homes, but three or four-story buildings with small, immaculately manicured rose gardens. Within a few more blocks eastbound, and these give way quickly to surprisingly dense deciduous forest, still mostly summer green but with hints of autumn beginning to touch the alders and maples. A break in the woods and I walk past a sizable community garden broken up into small family-sized plots full of fall vegetables. And then, a bit further into the woods, and I follow a few signs to my destination: Enkheimer Ried

Hey, wait, you’re in Germany, you can read German? Y’all, German uses the same letters as English, so it’s not exactly a huge leap to go from following signs to Schulenburg or New Braunfels in Texas to, um, following signs to original non-extra-crispy Schulenberg or Braunfels in Germany.

In retrospect, living in Texas prepared me surprisingly well for visiting Germany, with all the immigrant German culture that is deeply infused into Texas life, from the cuisine (chicken-fried steak being localized schnitzel, actually decent beer and sausage) to the pervasiveness of German names in Austin (Koenig, Dessau, Mueller).

Only, there are no Panzerschwein in Germany. Or as they would call it here, Gürteltier. Armadillos are indeed much safer from the Autobahn than the 130 Toll Road.

I also know my links from my rechts, despite having literally never set foot in an active German language class. Besides, what better education is there than immersion?

So, Enkheimer Ried. What is that? We already mentioned Bergen-Enkheim so that’s the locality name where we are. Ried sounds like, well, “reed”, the stuff that grows alongside a lake, and that is exactly what you see: a reed-lined lake formed by a berm protecting the residential reaches of Bergen-Enkheim to the west from the waters draining a small vale to the east, and forming a wetland lake, lined on either side by tall trees threaded by hike – bike – equestrian trails.

Yup, I flew nine hours to one of the most prominent cities in Europe and my first destination is basically the swamp, because, as I mentioned last blog, the way I recharge is through birds and this is the number one place in all of Frankfurt to see them.

It took me all of ten seconds to get a lifer (for non-birders: this is a bird I’m seeing for the first time in a lifetime): a flash of red in the trees revealed a foraging European Robin (Rotkehlchen to the locals, which of course must be pronounced like that doofy YouTube KRANKENWAGEN! meme). This being literally my first day in Europe, a high percentage of today’s birds were brand-new to me, but not all, with some birds being familiar introductions to America (European Starling, which defies the above meme by just being called Star) or also showing up in Japan (White Wagtail, Bachstelze). An impressively sized Eurasian Green Woodpecker (Grünspecht, and they really are that grün) chased off an energetic – and it turns out, embarrassingly generally named – Middle Spotted Woodpecker (Mittelspecht).

I’m just imagining old Linnaeus studying this: “It looks like it’s in between that bigger spotted woodpecker and that smaller spotted woodpecker in size, so, let’s just goldilocks this sucker.” Except in Swedish, I suppose.

A truly mid name for a very fun little bird, but at least it’s not just English where this suffers, because even the Latin name calls it medius, at least we didn’t name this thing “Medium Spotted Woodpecker” like it’s a friggin’ soft drink size.

I follow the hike – bike – equestrian trail along the lakeside, helpfully labeled “Nachtigallenweg” (“Nightingale Way”! sadly no nightingales this late in the year) and enjoy the cooling afternoon breezes in the shade of tall and aromatic noble fir trees.

Bliss.

Every so often passersby on bikes would wave. Hallo! or Guten Tag! for older folks. One older gentleman was curious as to how a clearly non-local would even find their way here, and I just pointed to my bird book and stammered out, “Ahhh, vogelbeobachtung” because the word for “birding” (birdwatching) in German is, no offense, really effing difficult for non-speakers to parse, though I definitely grew more confident with that word the more I had to use it.

It was more enough to satisfy the neighbor who smiled and nodded and wished me a “good luck with the photographs”, “there are many birds here” before we went our separate ways with a friendly “Tschüss!” Over and over the next few days I really honestly could have just flipped back to English, but he was the first of many to seem honestly surprised I was even making the attempt since, y’know, obviously not German here with these genetics. But also, I’m here to learn, not impose my brand of Standard American English (or my California Valley Speak, or my adopted Texas Drawl) on the rest of the world.

Generally, though, I felt curiosity, not hostility, because a smile is a smile wherever you go, and people are generally going to react with “friendly” if you project “friendly”. (Not as easy when your facial default saddles you with RBF but I at least try!)

One circuit around the big pond was plenty to give me almost three dozen species (and almost 50 on the day, 21 new), a great start for my trip, since one of my goals was to see at least 150 species of birds (100 new) over the next three weeks. But also, the sun was getting lower, and my stomach was beginning to growl.

Back to the train station it was, this time through the neighborhood, and back to that “Best Döneria” because, when you’re in Texas, you get tacos or barbecue, and when you’re in Germany, you get currywurst or döner kebab. They do say hunger is the best seasoning, but whatever magical spice blend they use (paprika? cumin? marjoram? garlic? thyme? all of it?) always feels perfect, that heady mix of spice and the unctuousness of the meat and the freshness of the vegetables, a little fizz from that bottle of Mezzo Mix (basically the logical conclusion to ordering an “orange coke” anywhere but Texas) and the growl is tamed.

As night fell, I heard the echoing song of a Black Redstart (Hausrotschwanz) from the tiled rooftops, oddly reminiscent of Canyon Wrens in the rocky vastness of Arizona. An ocean away from my (rented) bed, surrounded by chatter in Deutsch and Türkçe, and yet, somehow, I was home.

All too soon, I was back in my lodgings for the night, getting ready for the next day’s international travel, and trying to forestall the inevitable jet-lag you get from a nine-hour flight, when I spied something interesting — a rare bird unlikely to be seen anywhere on my itinerary had been seen in a wetland in rural Hesse, an hour north of me.

When I had my own working vehicle (and not the sadly derelict remains of one, permanently sidelined by a trashed transmission), I would drive clear to the Mexican border and back in pursuit of rare birds. When going to Japan, I’d use trains to do the equivalent, so, hey, when in Germany, why not do that here too?

I closed my eyes, eager for the journey ahead, with an alarm set for four…

There and Back Again, Day Zero: Gateway Gardens

September 11, 2024September 11, 2024 ~ Carlos/Giancarla Ross ~ Leave a comment

(September 11, 2023: Frankfurt am Main)

For years we talked about going to Europe together, but life always got in the way. We would talk about places we would visit, the friends we’d drop in to say hi to, the food we would try — but nothing would ever come to fruition. At least we had two trips to Japan together — where I realize in retrospect we weren’t good travel partners because I was too pushy and overeager, and she wanted very regimented and curated experiences., and even in our travels we found ourselves wandering apart more than we would be together. But for Europe? We didn’t have the money, and then when we didn’t have the time, and then eventually, we no longer had each other.

I was going to do this for myself, then. Why not? This was going to be my way to prove to myself I could move on, I could get by, I could be a stranger in a strange land and find myself on the other side of the planet in some weird quixotic ideal of reverse-colonialist fervor, a random Filipino-American bouncing across the European countryside, chasing rare bird alerts, hopping couches and stopping at hostels, taking my forty-four-year-old recently divorced ass across the continent in search of Dulcinea, and maybe a windmill or two to tilt.

But of course, I had to get there in the first place. See that date up there?

Yeah, folks, we’d all, of course, been holding off on everything for two long years thanks to COVID, and that meant I’d scraped up a nest egg of savings and PTO days from my social services work by assiduously masking, not spending my stray funds on avocado toast and Twitch streams or my Steam deck or whatever the hell the media tells us “elder millennials” are supposedly spending money on, and I was still completely in the weeds and trapped in Austin. Not everyone who lives in Austin realizes you can get to Europe nonstop using one of three airlines (four back in 2023), with three destinations available: Amsterdam, London, and Frankfurt. I knew I wanted the continent. I wanted quick access to the European rail network, and I also wanted to be dumped in a country where my default languages (English, Spanish, and Japanese) weren’t going to be the default.

And then a dear old friend got wind of my plans and said he had miles to burn and he would be happy to spend those miles on me.

The very first lesson of this trip, which must be addressed and acknowledged before I even set foot out the door to take the first step to Europe is that at no point in time did I do this “on my own“. Without the coworkers at my nonprofit who covered for me while I was out for three weeks, the housemates who gave me a place to stay without paying exorbitant market rent, and then many, many friends and family who encouraged me to go and do this at all and gave me so much of the time, space, and resources with which to do it — without all of them, none of this happens.

And then it’s just hurdle after hurdle and even with the ticket in hand and my rail pass booked, it still looked like this trip was doomed. My passport had expired, so I apply months out. I get my passport, but it’s a close call, just two or three weeks before the flight date. The Friday before I leave, I manage to not only get myself rear-ended on my rental e-bike (barely avoiding injury), but I lose my wallet along Town Lake on a different rental e-bike that afternoon. Somehow, Austin PD manages to contact me and I’m able to get my wallet back on Saturday, though not until most of my cards had already been cancelled. So I would have to do this trip with cash on hand and continuously shift money from my main bank account to my backup (which I had been using for DoorDash) to make anything work. Friends offer to float me small loans to get out there.

I get out to the airport. I have my backpack full of clothes and medications and travel toiletries and my BIPAP bag. I’ve got an eSim card set up. This is happening. By chance, there is a small unit temporarily based out of Austin that morning visiting from Saguenay, Quebec — a couple of sleek jets scream into the foggy Texas sky to go mock-dogfight with our air force trainees. They’re AlphaJets — a French / German collaboration.

I close my eyes, and I’m on a Lufthansa 787-9, cruising across the Atlantic. I can’t plug in my BIPAP, so I watch movies and TV shows as you do when the in-flight wifi peters out as it inevitably seems to do if you’re in economy.

I close my eyes again. We land. There are … air stairs. And a bus? What the…

Frankfurt Airport is, charitably speaking, not what I would consider an ideal welcome to Europe. Rather, it is the nightmarish chaos of lines seemingly in triplicate, full of passengers from all over the world who are panicked because half of them have to catch a flight in another terminal, at least a few of them are extra nervous because every other damn American still grouses when they have to travel on The Anniversary of That Day, and none of this is helpful when you are confronted with a byzantine array of corridors, many of which somehow manage to still not be marked in English.

Throw everything you’ve been told about “German efficiency” out the window, ’cause this ain’t any of it. I manage to find my way to the right line and get my passport stamped and also manage to get my eSim card working. At last. I can access my Eurail Pass and get out of transit hell, and after I drop off my backpack and most of my gear, it’s still mid-afternoon and I am next to delirious from sleep deprivation and jet lag, and badly in need of my daily meditation and centering.

I walk out the door of my hostel, and down a concrete path to see a small, manicured park. Gateway Gardens. Chattering away in a massive oak tree, are tiny songbirds. Eurasian Blue Tits. Great Tits. A Short-toed Tree-Creeper.

All right. There we freaking go.

Look, I am gregarious and I can talk your head off about damn near anything, but please do not mistake this for being extraverted. I love talking to individuals, but people, especially in herds, exhaust me.

No. I recharge with birds. I’m part of that tribe.

If figure, all right, let’s keep going. I have my wallet, I have my camera and binoculars, might as well jaunt over to the best game in town.

Just like that, all the fog of chaos parts, and I have my path laid out before me like a beacon.

I was going to be fine. I was there. I had, for now, traded H-E-B and Randall’s for REWE and LIDL, taquerias for donerias, kolaches for the treats at the Bäckerei.

The day had just begun, and I was as refreshed as if I’d had a full night’s rest. It was time to explore.

“Oligarch”

September 3, 2024September 3, 2024 ~ Carlos/Giancarla Ross ~ Leave a comment

(by Carlos/Giancarla Ross)

My story begins with an old, faded photo tucked away in an album, not the kind you have on social media or in a file folder on a computer, but the old, physical kind, back when Kodak was ubiquitous and not a distant memory.

It’s a sharp-looking German shepherd on a grass lawn, maybe some palm trees in the background, but everything presumably originally lush green, though the photo itself has long since faded to inadvertent sepia. I don’t actually ever remember seeing this dog in the flesh, but I do remember the single word, in all capital letters, handwritten on a corner of the photo.

“Oligarch”.

Who the hell names their dog Oligarch?

If I’d been an adult seeing that the first time, that would’ve been my question, but we’ve had that photo in our albums as long as I can remember, and this is basically concurrent with seeing the paternal visage of Ferdinand Marcos as “my president”. No, not Bong-Bong, his dad. The dictator.

I have fainter memories of my older cousins watching giant robots on teevee. A road trip through dust-choked roads lined with food stands and banana trees and garish jeepneys and tuk-tuks, up to the cool air of pine-covered mountains — not the Sierra Nevada or the Rockies or even the Guadalupes, but a place called Baguio, where you would have to drive up a long canyon past a giant concrete bust of President Marcos (long since demolished) and then a gigantic lion’s head, because I guess Baguio is known for lions? (It isn’t. The only lion I ever saw in the Philippines was in some picture book version of the Bible showing Daniel with the least scary-looking lions ever. It might have been Precious Moments. That memory is a bit hazier.)

I remember seeing equally faded photos, some of them legit black-and-white, of “running the rapids” at Pagsanjan — “they filmed Apocalypse Now there”, I was helpfully told many years later, even though I was still at that point too young to have seen or appreciated that film.

But yes. Oligarch.

A word that, for the first decade or so of my life, just meant, “that big dog in the one photo album”. A word otherwise bereft of meaning and filed away, as the father figure in the background of my young psyche changed from my barely remembered actual father, to, uh, I guess, proxy-dad Ferdinand Marcos, to the every-bit-as-nebulous “father figure” I’d get when I was four, a different president named Reagan, as we traded our nice home with the garden in Pilar Village for the choking smog at nightly gunfire of mid 80s LA — our own “Morning in America”, if you will.

I got into dinosaurs like every little boy, and then I wanted to be an astronaut like Mrs. McAuliffe, until she blew up on our teevee, and then a fighter pilot like Tom Cruise, before my eyesight got terrible. I played with the Voltron lions and watched Robotech, and then my mom got a job at the concrete company and she joined the company bowling league, and I thought the computer guy was really funny so I told mom to go talk to him, a conversation that has so far lasted thirty-seven years. (She took his surname a few years later, and so did I.)

I was a smart, curious kid, then. They called me gifted, and I breezed through everything because school was easy. The hardest part of going to school in Atwater Village in the mid-80s was knowing when to duck behind the concrete planters to avoid the return fire at the drive-bys. The second hardest part was not getting caught playing with the ditto sheets. Sorry, Gabriel.

Soon enough, my folks decided LA wasn’t a good place to raise a “gifted kid” and got a transfer to Arizona. Packed into my stepdad’s 1984 Nissan Sentra? That photo album. With Oligarch the Dog.

Even when I saw that word in my study lists for spelling bees — and I was a good spelling bee kid, even made state, I still never made the connection. It was just a word to memorize, I was in junior high, I still just didn’t have the context to know what that meant, how could I? Just. Oh, that’s a real word. Of course it is. Okay.

Just another tool with which to eventually win some academic competitions. Unfortunately, oligarch never showed up for me as a spelling bee kid. Euphemism and roan did, serving as proof that it’s never the words spelling bee kids get right that we remember, but the ones that keep us from winning that set of the Encyclopedia Britannica that would’ve been cool to have. And I was better at the Geography Bee anyhow. That was the first time I won money from Alex Trebek, and it wouldn’t be the last.

I was not a particularly progressive kid, because other than a particular, deeply unfortunate episode that forever kept the standard Filipino Catholicism from taking root, I was otherwise far too deep in my books, video games, and otherwise pleasing my family to be really truly aware of the importance of my place in the world. I was special. I was smart. I had absolutely no idea what I was supposed to do with any of it, so I just followed whatever goalpost was laid before me, and I had no way to understand my parents also had no idea what to do with my intelligence and curiosity and hyperactivity and complete lack of focus because in the late 80s and 90s, smart Asian kids didn’t have AD(H)D and terms like neurodivergence were simply not on the radar.

Besides, by this point, I was “as white as my dad” so why should I care about things like privilege and race and socioeconomics? Other people’s lives were affected by other people’s choices right?

There was no single epiphany, but I’m sure seeing that old photo album with good old Oligarch jogged a thing or two, as I started out on my real educational journey, going to Arizona State with absolutely no idea of the ensuing twelve years of meandering blunders that would leave me destitute and damn lucky to escape with a bachelor’s degree that I’ve only really ever used as a placeholder in a resume. What I did know was …

… wait a second. Why did we have a dog named Oligarch?

Why did we have pictures of Ferdinand Marcos in the house, and who the heck was my birth father, really?

Yeah. So. Oligarch was his dog. That academic-looking dude with the gray hair, in one or two pictures, all but forgotten in the ensuing years being the happy stepchild to funny computer guy.

Why didn’t he come to America with us? Why did he never once call? Why did it take until my third year of college for me to find out that he’d died the year prior?

Oligarch wasn’t just a German Shepherd!

Oligarch was my father.

No, not like that! Gee, phrasing!

More to the point: I was unknowingly the child of an oligarch.

When I was younger, I remember being told I was a “love child”, and I just thought, oh, Mom really loves me, but that, while absolutely still true to this day (love you Mom!) is not what that phrase means in Filipino culture. You see, when a guy loves a girl … but he’s already married to someone else … love child is a euphemistic way of saying I was a bastard. Illegitimate. Out of wedlock.

The scandal wasn’t even that my father had a mistress – because he was a high-ranking executive at San Miguel Beer Corporation (don’t be fooled, it’s not just beer, it’s basketball leagues, it’s shopping malls, it’s banking, it’s basically the most powerful corporation in the Philippines, even more so now than back then!). Powerful men with mistresses in a developing country? That’s almost a cliche.

The scandal was that my mom came from a nicer family than his wife.

Seriously.

My mother’s line, it turns out, gave rise to a Philippine revolutionary general, several provincial governors, models and movie stars.

My father’s line, two Philippine revolutionary generals, the opera singer who first recorded what is now the national anthem, provincial governors, a supreme court judge, and a certain Imelda Romualdez Marcos … apparently a first cousin once removed of my father.

Yeah. That Imelda. The wannabe Evita with thousands of shoes and her own nominally disapproving wink-wink-nudge-nudge biographical musical, rocking Ferragamos in the presidential palace while millions toiled in filthy slums that would flood out seven times a year from typhoon surge.

And my mom knew. I just never asked.

For all the questions I would pose about the world — what is that bird called, why does that mountain have a funky name, how do you make such good chicken adobo, it took me until the cusp of adulthood before I really even started thinking about where I came from, why I never wanted for anything, what my place in this world really was, or how I got there (and, I don’t just mean by Northwest Orient 747-200 back in 83).

I had never asked my mom why our photo album had a picture of a German Shepherd named Oligarch.

I just accepted it, just like I accepted heteronormativity and fiscal conservatism and the basic tenets of Christianity and the fact that we were “better off immigrants” because we made better choices than the other brown and black people.

Of course, none of that was ever true.

Even being a love child of an oligarch put me in a far, far better place than the millions of my own countrymen living in poverty so dire, Sally Struthers was asking me to spend “a cup of coffee a day” to save my own (more distant and less fortunate) cousins. I had the luxury of having a plane ticket to come to America, I didn’t have to brave the open seas on an overcrowded boat, or dodge la migra, because we were sponsored, we already had our anchors in place. People who truly struggle are not put in positions to invest money in defense industries, to potentially send their child to the Ivy League, to move to Hawaii when that adult child insists on paying most of their own way to college because of a misguided zeal for American individualism and libertarianism. (No, I don’t blame my folks — their choices and life are theirs, and they are resigned to the fact that we are now utterly and deeply incongruent in politics and religion, but we do still deeply care for each other all the same.)

I was indoctrinated into the American dream because I was taught I was meant to Be Somebody, not just because I was smart, not just because I was talented, but because, I think somewhere in my psyche, I was supposed to live up to being The Child of An Oligarch, and the world belongs to oligarchs. And why shouldn’t someone who was born to be special succeed – no, excel – in the meritocracy that is America?

Except no.

I was following my free will no more than that German Shepherd ever could. I was just floating along in that delusional fantasy world until bit by bit, it corroded itself in the face of hard reality.

Heck, my father burnt himself out trying to keep up with the expectations of his rivals and allies, and died young of lung cancer, leaving behind his three other children, his wife … and the other “wife” and child who got away. He should have just been an economics professor, spending his life serenading his love to the one he loved, but he was just … a dog named Oligarch.

I don’t have to live like that.

Sure, I’ve had more false starts than I can count. Maybe this, too, might be a false start, or maybe I’ll keep at this storytelling gig, to go along with the social services career I’ve built with the help of dear friends and mentors and, yes, family.

But if I am to be accorded some amount of privilege in this world, then it’s my responsibility to use that to lift people up, not just me, and certainly not just to perform fancy human tricks for the benefit of the hereditarily and unfairly powerful.

Ask the questions. Examine. Learn. Refuse to be complicit.

After all: I’m no one’s pet.

I am no Oligarch.