and it wears me out…
again the sinking sun is spilling honey over the roof of the house across the backyard. i’m restless, close to blowing a fuse.
i got to give the deleuze/kate bush talk tomorrow. the conference started today and i spent all day long listening to talks which were mostly pointless, consisted of satanic power-point presentations or had conclusions such as: “…and therefore my thesis is that gender is an important category in hollywood musicals of the 50s!” i’m not kidding.
anyway, sorry about the last entry. let’s get into a more forgiving, descriptive mode :
so, last friday alice arrived. i picked her up at the station and it was funny, i saw her walking down the platform so i went up to her, and even when i was standing right in front of her, blocking her way, she tried to look around me, looking out for me. it was only when i started to address her by her name that she recognized me.
“i looked out for black hair!” she exclaimed.
it was weird, but it didn’t feel strange to meet her in real life at all. it was like meeting somebody i’ve always already known. we drove back to my place, she dropped her luggage and we went to the supermarket, prepared dinner and then sat on the balcony, eating and talking and drinking the rest of the white wine we didn’t need for cooking. i think alice had little déjà-vus all the time walking through the neighborhood she knew from photos and meeting people she knew from the journal.
on saturday we went to the cathedral, walked through town, went to the café and the ‘connection.’ sunday we went to the zoo and the botanic garden, we watched seinfeld together and on monday she accompanied me to the office where she met elaine. in the evening we had some fast food and walked through ehrenfeld. all the time we were talking and talking. surprisingly (or not surprisingly) there was no shortage of topics. some of the best moments were when we were dj-ing, listening to music together and discussing it.
tuesday morning we boarded the thalys and arrived at paris in the early afternoon. the weather was beau-ti-ful! sunshine and blue sky! we walked through the latin quarter, went to see notre dame, point neuf, the louvre and the parks.
it was great. i was in paris for the first time and linguistically i was totally off track. suddenly i addressed alice in german, talked to the waiter in a mixture of french and english and was totally confused every now and then.
in the evening we took the metro to bercy stadium to see radiohead. i had never been in such a *big* room before. it was overwhelming. the concerts i’ve been to up to now have been more or less ‘club’ concerts. this was a totally different thing! we had pretty good seats at the grandstands and i was glad that we were not up front ‘in the pit’ as alice’s friends were, because they were carrying out people who collapsed there all through the gig.
the setlist (which i don’t remember in detail) was great! some obscure songs and a lot of very forceful versions of my favorites. suddenly they started to play a song which i hadn’t expected at all: ‘fake plastic trees’ and when the third verse started i totally lost it. something snatched and i was so glad that it was dark and i couldn’t stop myself from crying and crying and crying. ever since you and your fake plastic smile had entered my life i have to think about you when i hear this song.
after the concert we met phil selway (the drummer) at the peripheries of the backstage area and he signed my ticket 
we took a taxi back into town and since my train left the next morning at seven we simply stayed up, sat in a café, talked, payed 11,80 € for two cups of coffee and when the sun went up over boulevard saint germaine we walked through the empty and quiet streets to the station.
when she was walking me to the platform i realized i had a lump in my throat so i tried to make saying good-bye as short as possible. the ride back on the train was surreal. because of all the impressions, the lack of sleep, the thoughts in my head, the emotions stirred up by the concert. i don’t know. the prevailing question was: what now?
it has turned cold here. got the heating on. thanks for the commentaries, i think i would like to comment on them, but not now. need some sleep badly. tomorrow’s talk-day.
