4 - Basel-Freiburg

Once again on the train.  Lulls me to sleep. 

As the train leaves the station, the tree of possibilities seems infinite – this could lead anywhere.  But as we get closer to the next place, the tree of possibilities narrows, until we embark once again.  I think of grabbing the knee of the girl next to me.  I think of the present and all the possible futures.  I am paralyzed by the vertigo of possibilities and look outside to the passing landscape of green.  A blur of all possible shades of green intermittent with signs of human life like houses, cars, people riding bicycles. 

It is a forty-minute train ride to Freiburg. 

The first thing we do when we arrive at a new city is to mark the occasion by offering the excesses of our metabolic systems to the local plumbing, so that our excesses might flow and mix with the native excesses.  At the train station at Freiburg it cost 80 cents to go into the toilet.  80 cents to pee.  The only place I can think of offhand where one is charged to pee in the States is in the Balthazar restaurant in Soho.  But there, there is an attendant.  One tips, very different from paying up front.  And one tips one or two dollars, in exchange for the liquid waste of the memory of expensive French wine.  This compared to the purely metabolic needs serviced in the train station. Old Naturalizer hold me in good steed. 

I am amazed by the infinite variety of urinals in the world.  There must have been a time when the designs were more varied.  But once a certain “urinal-ness” was achieved by a successful design, then all subsequent designs conformed to the basic concept.  Yet, the specifics are so varied.  Some have metal gratings, like a drain.  These metal drains can be circular, rectangular, or irregular.  Some urinals hang more perpendicularly and have shields on either side.  Others are more like oversized salad bowls, open mouth to the sun.  These wide bowls must be approached from a more vertical aspect.  The urinals which line a wall, those are approached more at or against, than from above. 

The specifics of having lived can be complex.  Shared experiences (like having consumed exotic forms of melted cheese in specific ways) can be the glue that somehow make one feel closer to another.  The Scandinavians (I think it was the Swedish) have a specific word for two men who have slept with the same woman.  It translates into something like “brothers of the belly.”  Some shared experiences can be more complex than exot!ic forms of melted cheese. 

Taxis in Freiburg are the color of American interiors: ecru, off-white, Navajo, cream...this color we have more names for, since it is popular with Yuppies for their living rooms.