HUMAN WRECKAGE

The Morning I Found Myself in Germany

Have you ever experienced that strange, conflicting and concurrent surge of panic and joy when your spouse breaks their leg but your favourite team wins the championship in the exact same moment? I’ve not either but I’m certain the Germans have a word for it.

I am a middling writer; neither terrible nor terribly successful. Avant-garde auteur Jean Cocteau quipped, “The greatest masterpiece in literature is only a dictionary out of order.” Consequently there are six or seven dictionaries in the Crooked 9; none of them have been overly beneficial to my career. Because it’s 2019 I also have a Merriam-Webster app on my iPad.

My routine most mornings is consistent. Two cups of black coffee while perusing the print edition of the Globe and Mail. I then check the news apps on my iPad to learn if anything happened in the world between the time the Globe was put to bed and I woke up. I check the weather report and my e-mail. I look at Facebook. I review the air traffic over Edmonton International Airport because there’s an app for that. Following two hands of Klondike solitaire I get curious about Merriam-Webster’s Word of the Day.

Up to date for the moment, I smoke a couple of cigarettes and contemplate the flowers in the garden, the birds flitting about the two feeders hanging from the birch and the miniature Easter Island head nestled in the shrubbery. Moai are thought to be clan totems and so I think about my family’s dead, remarkable people I knew and loved. I pray my own passing will be short and sharp, rather than a prolonged period of agony. Then I go deep: will the Rolling Stones ever again release an album of new material; I’ve no memory of the world without them. One year into the first draft of my fourth novel I've written myself into a midway plot jam even though I know the ending; I just have to get there, find my way. The Canadiens' Stanley Cup window has closed, and modern baseball, strikeouts and home runs, is boring beyond existential ennui.

Sometime last week Merriam-Webster’s random Word of the Day was luftmensch: “an impractical contemplative person having no definite business or income.” The Germans have a word for me. Of course they do.   

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