American Fez

The Cruel Sea

My professional career can quite reasonably be compared to a sandcastle. 

Not an elaborately crennellated, multi-towered, dreamy Schloss-looking creation that wins first prize in a vigorously contested sandcastle building competition.

But one of those small, square crumbling keeps that are unceremoniously dumped out onto the beach from a cheap, castle-shaped plastic bucket.

The maker of this poor excuse for a sandcastle is obviously no tanned Apollo cruising the shore in bright board shorts and fancy flip flops. No, he's a pasty white gnome trying to hide in the shade and afraid of venturing to close to the water's edge. 

He won't be missed in the Tiki bar or at the after hours bonfire on the dunes. He's already persona-non-grata at the scuba club. Look, a gang of young beach bums just bounced their volleyball right through the ruins of his sandcastle. They didn't even know it was there. 

A grimy seagull swoops down and settles amid the fallen turrets, takes an oily black and white crap and flies away again. The tide is coming in. 

Herr Today, Gone Tomorrow

If the German bid happens, I remarked to a colleague of mine, then I will eat my collection of Stalingrad memorabilia.

Fortunately, my collection of Stalingrad memorabilia consists of a potato similar to the type desperate combatants might have scavenged to distill vodka, so if the German bid does indeed materialize I won't encounter too much difficulty transforming my frontline souvenir into an edible arrangement.

The modern, Euro-toting Geschäftsmann, of course, is nothing like his regimented, shaven-skulled and square-headed, bier-swilling Aryan forebears; he is often Turkish, for one thing, equally at home in the bazaar as in the Weihnachtsmarkt.

You may accuse me of trading in outrageously sophomoric international stereotypes. You may claim I am guilty of gratuitous insertion of long, italicized German words into my blog post purely for my own amusement. And you would be correct on both counts.

But I am sitting in a dreary conference room with time on my hands, waiting for the German bid to disintegrate before my very eyes. Then we will be forced to accept the American bid, which is considerably lower, being neither lucrative nor prestigious. 

It's profoundly depressing. Indeed, the Weltschmerz in here is palpable. Although at least my Stalingrad potato is safe in its glass case for now.

Andromeda

In the museum, a small boy yawns.

His father, slouching on a bench nearby, camera cradled in his crotch like a point and click fig leaf, gapes bleary-eyed at a chunk of classical sculpture on a plinth.

An ancient bottom in marble: two heroic buttocks slapped together in antiquity by the so-called Master of the Ass Cheeks.

The father inclines his head, as if this slight change in perspective will reveal the secret of the Master's curvy carving skills.

Nothing doing, apparently: just a different angle on an antique bum.

"Lower Torso of Andromeda" proclaims signage on the plinth. But how does it know? There's little indication this marble bum was once chained to a marble rock.Surely this could be anybody's bum; a universal ass.

And so the ancient bottom begets a modern top: a small boy yawning in a museum.

The Visitation

Finding myself in deodorant-sniffing proximity to a multi-millionaire, I am dazzled by the crisp spotlessness of one who pays another to do his laundry; the healthy tan, too, obviously; the celestially-synchronized wristwatch and the gleaming handmade shoes that you know are handmade because the cobbler's fingerprints are still visible when the toecaps catch the light.

Although he is oily beyond the dreams of Texan oilmen, there is no trace of oil about his straight-backed person. No doubt it has all been ritually scraped off with a strigil by some hired hand.

By comparison, I am a stooping and crumpled plebeian whose armpits drip with the rancid juices of his ignoble labors. Any expert eye can see my formerly white collar is already starting to go blue around the neck. 

But here I am, basking in the radiance of this Sun King, if only briefly so blessed, while he tours my office and decides whether or not to dispense his bounty.

Perhaps I should surreptitiously touch the hem of his garment for luck as he lingers by my desk? After all, if we are returning to a medieval master-serf based business model then we might as well go the whole hog.