In honor of Munich’s Oktoberfest, which has been cancelled this year because of the pandemic, an excerpt from The Joys of Travel:
Remember this.
The vast hall. The great din. The spilled beer. The smoky haze. The saccharine music. The pretzel vendors. The workhorse waitresses. The buttery smell of roasted chickens. The vendors of silly hats. The bodies squeezed onto benches that disappear into the distance and suggest a school cafeteria of colossal scope and questionable fare. The strange feeling – as you drink engulfed by a human sea – of escape, of having departed the world of work, responsibility, sobriety. (Greatly heightened if it’s a weekday.) The sense of ceremony and import given, through songs and toasts and the monumental scale, to a frat boy’s passion. The private party of your table, in a humming hangar of tables, in a makeshift city of hangars, that survives new arrivals and silent departures and flows almost seamlessly from day into night. Your total ignorance of day or night. The young woman opposite you who presses her glass mug to her dirndled bosom and says with an ingenuous, combustible smile: “I love Oktoberfest!”
A doubleheader yesterday: dermatologist in the morning (he does most of his damage to my face) and dentist in the afternoon.
My dentist told me yesterday that, not surprisingly, he's seen an increase in broken teeth caused by grinding.
Yesterday evening I did my second successful virtual event in five days. (Considering my tenuous relationship with technology, that may be the most remarkable sentence I write this year.)
This week I had my first social outing in five months with someone other than Hania. We arrived at the café in masks, and gave each other a wide berth around the outside table. All the other tables were occupied. At one point in our conversation, a bit of leaf from my matcha drink tickled my throat. I sat silently suppressing the urge to cough, not just because of the current abomination of coughing in public but because tickle-induced coughing almost always leads, in my case, to sneezing, which is even more horrific. I knew that I could explain my sudden eruptions to my friend, but what of the rest of the clientele? The entire terrace would turn to me, coughing and sneezing, as if to a perpetrator of crimes against humanity. In the end, I successfully stifled the cough – small tears forming in my eyes – but thought long and hard about my next outing.
In an attempt to ward off hurricanes I've done a cartoon that will only work if we get hit by one.