06May / 2014

O what a lucky man

So now Odin keeps a package of smoked, dried sausages in his desk drawer and never goes for a walk on his lunch break without one in his pocket, now that the grey crow has tracked him to his office. He goes out, the crow lands in the grass and Odin crouches there, holding out a sausage, C’mere, c’mere, lunch little buddy, across the street from a diplomat’s residence — guard, flag, servants — then gives up and tosses the sausage to the crow.

The crow marches up and down the street like Groucho Marx chomping on a cigar, then hides the sausage by the curb. Odin walks to a nearby park, but not without being accosted by the crow a second time. Sorry, pal, just one today.

How would his suit smell if he packed sausages everywhere he went? Like a mad relative, that’s how.

The park was recently re-opened after running wild for decades and is green and overgrown. Crows watch him from the trees and there is an observatory.

What say the hanged?

How unlikely it is that we are even here, we lucky crowd, conceived against millennia of opposition, branches withered and frozen, starved and broken and trimmed and yet here we hang, fat and ripe and feeling sorry for ourselves.

There is a science to luck and that science is put yourself in its way. Life might follow you into your room and roll on its back at your feet while you sit there at your desk, but luck is outside, barking at cars and jumping from branch to branch and looking you in the eye and smiling.

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30Apr / 2014

Can we have a show of hands?

The air in northern Crete, in the week of Easter, has a grainer scent to it than springtime air in Vienna. Cretan spring air is herbal and smells of land, and sea, while that in Vienna is floral and urban.

At least where Odin works it is.

How many of you removed a tick from a teenaged girl’s navel today? Can we have a show of hands? Because Odin has.

Odin wonders if he leads a charmed life.

Also, whenever he hears the word TICK his skin crawls and he has to exert effort to not scratch himself from head to toe and shake his hair like a dog emerging from a lake.

Odin had a thing recently. It must have been Tuesday because on Monday it was raining and on Tuesday he needed to go to the tobacco shop to get back on schedule with his lottery tickets – Odin is in the habit of buying tickets for two different games, and if he buys them on the wrong days they are more expensive because the optional drawing options (which are obviously a scheme to get customers to pay additional marginal fees, but OTOH are also the only thing Odin ever wins) are for two drawings instead of just a single drawing. So he has to synchronize his purchases and when he is on schedule buys only on Tuesdays or Thursdays.

We shall not dwell on this because a full explanation would be even more confusing than the above.

Odin had a thing recently. On his way to catch a streetcar after work, the grey crow followed him up the street, and Odin felt badly about being empty-handed. On his way to get the lottery tickets on Tuesday on his lunch break, the crow followed him down the sidewalk again, this time not flying but walking, sort of waddling like a casual little penguin, while Odin spoke to it.

Sorry, little dude. I’m fasting today.

But Odin bought a ciabatta-looking roll with cheese baked over it at the bakery next to the tobacconist and stood on his corner waiting for the crow, nibbling his cheese roll. The crow arrived at the moment Odin gave up on it.

Hi.

Odin tossed it the remains of the roll, about 80%, and the crow hesitated only briefly before flying away with it.

With the flat, rectangular roll in its beak, it looked like a flying hammerhead shark.

Odin’s conscience was assuaged.

No, wait: this was on Monday (Monday is also an okay day to buy lottery tickets) because on Tuesday the rest of the thing happened: returning from a walk, Odin saw his crow on the sidewalk by the corner, eating.

Odin was fascinated to realize that he is not the only human trained by the crow.

The man was sharply dressed, in an expensive blue suit, Ascot tie, nice watch and shoes. Somewhat younger than Odin, let’s say in his forties. When he noticed Odin, he concealed the roll in his hand (Odin had half a mind to tell the man corvids like meat, too, man) and examined the display of a mobile phone. Odin greeted him and the man greeted back.

Odin disappeared around the corner. A blackbird watched Odin from a gate and Odin watched it back. It looked birdlike and mechanical, like the robot robin in David Lynch’s Blue Velvet, and just like that he remembered Laura Dern’s grimace in Blue Velvet when Isabella Rossellini showed up naked on the porch – a facial expression like the sum total of all silent movie face acting in history.

And he imagined Second Crow Man inhaling nitrous oxide thru a plastic mask.

And singing.

Odin’s wife recently said to him that he sometimes says things that seem more the result of his bizarre trains of thought than what immediate company is saying or doing. She seems convinced that his mode of thought is exotic.

Isn’t everyone like this? Odin tells himself. Everyone thinks this way, right?

Or are some people really just baked potatoes all the way through?

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24Apr / 2014

The science of evil

Odin is not hungry so he goes to a park because it’s such a nice day. He sits on a bench and reads a book.

He is careful not to sit on a bench by the playground near the park entrance, because Odin is a middle-aged man in a suit and the book is The Science of Evil and that might not go over well in a playground, although Odin himself finds it a charming image.

Odin sits on white bench under a giant Blood Beech tree (so they are called in German) and reads a black book about zero negative empathy and the neurological origins of evil.

He borrowed the book from his kid, sort of half-trading it for The Wisdom of Psychopaths, a book of his.

Move along, nothing to see here.

People jog past. People walk past. People sit on the grass and sun themselves.

Sit in the park reading a book about evil: isn’t this what a Bond villain might do? Am I a potential Bond villain? wonders Odin.

What is a Bond villain anyhow, nowadays?

Someone with more than a certain quantity of money, he thinks. Above a certain amount of money, the evil ensues automatically.

Once you have more than what could be defined, by any stretch of the imagination, as ‘enough’ you are a Bond villain, because someone who is not a Bond villain would have paid their taxes, or given away the excess.

Nowadays, you don’t need a ray gun pointed at the moon. Nowadays, you are the Koch Brothers, fracking. You are Dick Cheney, running a fake real war from a hidden location.

Odin goes back to his reading.

I know these people, he thinks, reading case studies.

Better than, I am these people, he thinks.

Am I these people?

Am I?

A black crow, a stranger with a crooked wing feather, watches Odin from beneath a car when he walks back to the office.

Odin watches it back.

Am I?

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11Apr / 2014

Colder than it looks

Odin eats the generic Oreos for lunch with the gusto of a starving man who had been sucking bark post-apocalypse and had just found a box of generic Oreos in the back pocket of a mail carrier slaughtered by a rampaging mob back before the zombies killed all the mobs.

Walking is a little complicated. He has to pin a box of Greek salad (getting in the mood for a pre-Easter week in Crete) under one arm, hold the box of cookies in one hand and simultaneously twist cookies apart, eat the halves without frosting, press the frosting-halves together to make whole cookies with double frosting and eat them, without getting hit by a car or spotted by a crow. If his mobile phone rang he’d fall apart.

The day is beautiful, beautiful, beautiful. Colder than it looks, sunny, and Friday before a week of vacation. Family doing well, hobbies doing okay, sort of a general feeling of… despairlessness that is really delicious, in contrast to the cookies which are, seriously, how did our society evolve to such a point, where a grown man eats something like this? And not just any man: Odin, god of the North?

Seriously.

But Odin is without despair. At this very moment, he can feel a new universe pressing in on this one, like a pig at a trough, like a pervert in a subway, like a deaf man in a mosh pit, like a ray of light reflected from a hospital window, like wind on an otherwise still day like those bugs that hop around on the beach like a bird high up like

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21Mar / 2014

Shroud

Don’t forget to have her check you for… says Odin’s wife.

Yeah, yeah, says Odin, who is going to the dermatologist.

Odin is used to waiting a long time at doctors, so he is a little surprised by the speed at which things transpire this time.

Do you have time to check me for… he asks the doctor after spending less than a single article in an obsolete magazine in the waiting room.

Sure, she says. He gets undressed and she looks him over. A mirror takes him by surprise and he resolves to work out more and eat less.

Nothing he had worried about was anything to worry about, she says, But this here, now. It should go immediately. You want an appointment or shall we do it now?

Um, says Odin. Now, I guess.

Let me show it to you, enlarged on the monitor.

Odin looks at it, feeling like a character in an H.P. Lovecraft story gazing upon an Old One nestled down amidst belly hairs enlarged to two-by-fours.

Yeah, let’s do it now, he says, with increased vigor.

Back onto the table, shave, shot, cookie-cutter, stitch, stitch, bandaid and he’s standing up again looking at the hygienic paper cover the doctor had unrolled over the table before plopping him down. It looks like the Shroud of Turin, a little crumpled, with a sweat stain the size and shape of a medium-to-large man and, down by the feet, a bunch of black fuzz.

Apparently Odin’s socks today are lintier than average.

Or: the Effects of Fear-Induced Perspiration on Lint Adhesion, thinks Odin.

I always thought it was just a mole, thinks Odin. But it was something else. Something… eldritch and ancient.

In this fashion, Odin will go about cheering himself up.

The doctor gives him an an appointment to have the stitches out on April first. Upon hearing the date, tasteless prank after prank begin scrolling through Odin’s brain.

Nothing he could ever really do, but still. He is thankful for the distraction, it keeps him from thinking about the linty, sweaty paper, and about the tiny, ancient thing.

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18Mar / 2014

Halfway up a tree

Odin is halfway up a tree. It is a big tree. An ancient tree on an ancient, stony mountain, one of many in a grove.

A grove of Yggdrasils.

Odin is halfway up this one Yggdrasil of many. He looks down and thinks: fuck. He is so high up he would die a dozen times if he fell, so he keeps climbing.

But the tree is so gigantic he can’t see the top. And to be honest, Odin is scared. So he starts climbing back down. He doesn’t climb long before he notices a branch hangs over a plateau of grey stone. He climbs out along the branch and dismounts to the stony earth, to his great relief.

He wakes up and there is an angry red scratch on the top of his wrist he assumes he got roughhousing with the cat the night before.

At breakfast he tells his wife about being stuck halfway up an ancient tree. Did the fire department come and get you, she asks.

At lunch he walks to the coffee store and buys a kilo of coffee. Odin can never remember if he wants a kilo or half a kilo and always buys a kilo and notices afterward it is more than he wanted, he should have bought half a kilo.

He looks forward to smelling it when he gets home.

On the way to the coffee store, he saw the grey crow standing by the bench, watching him, so he buys peanuts and a sandwich. When he gets back to the bench, a German woman is parking her car nearby and the crows keep away until she finishes, waiting high up in the trees.

When she finishes and gets out of her car and walks away, two men walk past, carrying advertising from door to door. After they pass, a man walks by with a white dog on a leash. Three boys walk past on their way home from school. Several cars. A man on blue bicycle.

But then the crows come. First the black one, then the grey one.

The black one is eating a sandwich. Then Odin throws him some peanuts. It sets down the sandwich, takes the peanuts, hides them, then comes back for the sandwich.

The grey one does the same thing, except it hides pieces of sandwich too.

Odin guesses rats come at night and feast, and the next day the crows are all, WTF? But maybe not. Instincts are things that worked in the past, right?

“I am your life.” When he dreams, Odin asks his dreams what they mean. The tree said it was his life. Looking up dream symbol information online, a lot of sites say trees are the personality, or the self, or the life, or connections; all things Odin has been thinking about.

What say the slain?

Sometimes life is relentless. It is like the giant shark bending the bars of your shark cage. It is like the monster in the movies that can’t be killed, climbing back in through the window after you lock the door on it. Like an army of zombies surrounding your house. Like whack-a-mole. Like a salesman. Like an infestation of moles. Like ants. Like a tree full of birds, watching your every move.

What does it want?

It wants to give you another chance. It wants to give you exactly what you need. It wants to help you be more like you.

That would be so cool, it thinks.

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11Mar / 2014

Stuck in stone

It is a beautiful early spring day, so Odin sticks to the shady side of the street, because he is still not done taking meds that make his skin super-sensitive to sunlight. He talks to his wife on his mobile phone and laughs and crows follow him half the way to the tobacco shop where he buys his lottery tickets.

A crow flies past with a beakful of what looks like moss.

Pasta salad at the deli, and some peanuts. He makes it all the way back to the office, though, without encountering any hungry corvids.

But the day is too sunny, too bright to worry about crows.

Wander far, Huginn and Muninn.

What say the slain?

I was encased in stone all my life. Closed up in granite like a cursed jinn. What are the advantages of being trapped in rock?

You are safe and can’t be touched.

What are the disadvantages of being trapped in stone?

You are blind and deaf. You can’t dance or sing or taste your food. You can’t kiss anyone, or feel it when they touch you, or hold them when they are sad.

How do you get out of stone?

What say the hanged?

Look at me here, swinging in the sun, my shadow dancing with the dogs.

Maybe I looked at the moon too much.

But at least I was outside.

Maybe I ran through the brush at night or chased bees or scared people with my shadow.

But I was alive, what was I supposed to do?

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Metamorphosism

Tag Archives: odin

O what a lucky man

Can we have a show of hands?

The science of evil

Colder than it looks

Shroud

Halfway up a tree

Stuck in stone