Was just about to leave school...

When I realized that this will be my last chance to blog. I guess I can do it again, but it's going to cost me money if I want to, so there's really no point.

So goodbye Rome. It's been fun. It's been more than fun, it's been insane, a wild ride through education, culture, and personal growth. I don't have much of a big to-do to leave with, tonight I'm having our second farewell dinner and then going out to a beach club.

Tomorrow is the Vatican. Saturday morning I get on a plane and come home. I can't wait to see my little monsters, I'm going to cuddle Beep until he goes batshit trying to squirm away. I might if even shed a tear or two. I can't wait to see my nuzzbuzz, either, and go see Dark Knight. Excited about that, after hearing all of my friends go on about how great it is.

Blog will stay up, because when I get home I'm going to retroactively upload pictures from the weekends that I couldn't get the school wifi to let me upload, in case people want to see some of the wildness from love parade, or something. The video of the visual show at the end of the night is definitely worth a watch, maybe not for the full ten minutes, but it's fucking cool.

Sunday I'm going out to Dallas to check out Barcadia in the late afternoon, maybe do dinner somewhere out there (Freebirds!!!), and go to the Church for some sexy female DJ's playing electro stuff. Everyone's invited to come out and along, I know some of the burner troupe are planning on meeting me up there already.

I'm back for ten days, so if you want to hang out let me know so I can pencil you in, my time will be pretty squeezed up between working and making ready for the next leg of the venture. Then it's off to New York. Yes, there will be a seansparksnewyork blog as well. I probably should have just been conservative with blogspot names and made one that was call seansparkstraveling, but... eh.

So that's it, in and out of five weeks overseas with a whimper.

-Sean

Means so much more knowing the words...

What's going on
Could this be my understanding
It's not your fault I was being too demanding
I must admit it's my pride that made me distant
All because I hoped that you'd be someone different
There's not much I know about you
Fear will always make you blind
But the answer is in clear view
It's amazing what you'll find face to face

I turned away because I thought you were the problem
Tried to forget until I hit the bottom
But when I faced you in my blank confusion
I realized you weren't wrong, it was a mere illusion

It really didn't make sense
Just to leave this unresolved
It's not hard to go the distance
when you finally get involved face to face

21 guns for an awesome jacket

Last year I bought a G-Star jacket in Seattle that was ever-so-sexy, tight, and gray. Like what's happened lately with many things associated with Seattle, though, it is now lost from me in the chaos of space-time. Some German-British girls are now the proud owners of my sexy jacket, because I left it hanging to dry on their bathroom door when they were kind enough to let me wash my face and change. So it goes.

My inner-Zen-capitalist is rationalizing the loss by saying I have equaled the balance for the kickass leather jacket I got in Florence. Too bad I couldn't have Temple-of-Doomed it with a bag of sand instead. At least I didn't have to run from any boulders.

Today is the second-to-last day of school. I'm happy about that. Sadly, I didn't learn that much Italian in school. Most of what I can speak I taught myself here, with flashcards, recitation, going out on my own and meeting people, trying. The three and a half hours we spent every day in the classroom only hurt my head and made me tired, and now I'm definitely ready for it to be over. I don't even care what I get for a grade.

Tonight is the first of two farewell dinners, this one sponsored by API (the company who I went through to come here), and the second by LDM (my university). I love free meals. I'm going on a gelato frenzy now, two a day for the rest of my time here, because I know I'm not going to have it this good again for a long while, and I want to try every flavor and dress-up combination I haven't tried yet.

Last night Allison, Sam, Jaquelin, and I went to the Cork (Irish pub) after getting gelato. Jaquelin has a little boy-thing person here, a guy named Giovani, and when Allison and I were calling it an early night from fatigue, we talked about her situation on the walk back. Jaquelin was tempted ever so slightly to move here and give love a chance, and honestly I couldn't blame her for wanting to. Why not take the plunge and see what unfolds? Every great thing I've enjoyed remembering in my life has been the result of folly or madness, from doing a 8 city tour by myself on spring break one year to driving to Austin at the crack of dawn because someone convinced me it would be fun. Those are the adventures worth having, and even if her relationship with this guy who speaks almost no English fell apart, she could still say she lived a more amazing fantasy than most people dare to dream.

Fuck logistics, fuck your house of cards, fuck the friends who want you to stay, seize something amazing and leap. Don't half-ass it, either, just jump and pray that you live to talk about it. If not, you won't care anyway. Falling off a cliff and surviving taught me that, though I wouldn't say that was a decision. More so gravity being insistent about its sentiment towards matter.

But hey, it makes a great story. When we're old, ugly, feeble and useless, what more do we have left? I want to live a life that wows the few brave youngsters who chance to listen to an old guy talk. I think more people should do the same.

So Jaquelin, if you ever read this blog, do the wrong thing, the crazy thing, the inspired thing. Jump off a cliff, and land on some hot Italian boy cock.

-Sean

Whew!

Today I had to redo my oral presentation. Yesterday I tried to do it in front of the other girls in my class, locked up in brain dead post-"two days of no sleep" mode, and stammered my way through a sweaty retarded string of broken sentences and incorrectly conjugated words.

I still feel like shit today, a not-so-subtle nudge from the universe that I'm actually starting to age, but my teacher let me do it over with just her in the room. I rewrote the whole thing yesterday and made it simpler, then recited it over and over again last night until I couldn't stand anymore. Literally. I forced myself not to nap yesterday, because napping has done nothing good for me at all here. Just makes me tired when I wake up, then not able to sleep when I want to go to bed. Last night I was stumbling around the apartment with a sheet of chicken scratched sentences in my hand, mumbling them over and over. Sometimes my eyes would cross involuntarily, or the floaters from when I had my nose broken would become apparent. I felt like a malfunctioning robot, like Johnny five in the second movie after he got his ass kicked by the bank robbers. Crazy, pissed off, committed, and falling apart.

Eventually I fell onto the bed with the paper in my hand, and I woke up like that this morning. Apparently I tried to set my alarm when sleep was covering me with its leaden blanket, but I didn't set the switch all the way back to the "on" position. I slept in two hours, but since I've been making myself get up at 6 every morning, it wasn't a big deal.

Tomorrow is the review for my final, and then Thursday is our last day. I've started pitching to everyone that we go to one of the mega-clubs in Ostia, just so we can say we did a beach club in Italy. Plus, I want to get completely shitty and discard every bit of Italian language I've absorbed in the past five weeks.

Friday I'm doing the Vatican in a very special way. I'm going with my uncle S. to check out the many artifacts in the museums, etc, and staying up all night in Roma afterwards. Have to pack everything first, and figure out what the fuck to do with the bottle of wine I bought. Shipping is expensive, but I know it won't survive being checked in my bag. I considered hollowing out the memory foam travel pillow my mom gave me for the trip, but it's not long enough to ensconce the neck of the bottle.

This way, though, I get to have one more madcap adventure in the city, rife with history, culture, and Hunter S. Thompson's preferred method of experiential interpretation. Then I can load my shit into a cab, get on a plane, and turn my brain off with sedatives for 9 hours. When I get to Newark airport it will be 11 AM the same day I left, and I can have breakfast in some shitty airport restaurant and pretend I don't have jetlag. It will probably still hit me, but at least I'll have started my circadian rhythm on the proper morning hour.

"Proper." American. Cheeseburgers. Football. MTV. Constantly going. Work. Bush. Texans.

Fuck. I don't want to go home. Just ship me BBQ, texmex, and my cats. You can all come visit me. I don't need the rest of the shit that comes with America. Maybe burning culture, but I can just as easily find that or create it here.

-Sean

Dancing

In this moment
Dancing as free as the air
Screaming, smiling
I don't even speak your language
But now all of you are my friends
And there's nothing you can do about it

Love Parade

This fucking baby wants me to throw it out the front bay doors of this plane. I can hear it in the screams, the complete dissatisfaction with existence as a whole, it's saying "Help me! Please... someone turn this whole thing off! I don't want sentience, just give me sweet oblivion! I want to hit the ground like an overripe watermelon! It'll be fun!"

It would be for me, at least. The plane's about to land, so I can't mask this tiny banshee with some soothing trip hop anymore. Must turn off all electronics, or risk the wrath of a stern and grandmotherly flight attendant. I wish I'd given myself more time in Germany, toe-dipping into an entire country was such a tease, especially when I realized I could actually get laid there if had a few days to work at it. And I need to get laid in a terrible way, I've caught myself making my usual instinctive utterances that I usually think in my head at the site of a nicely curved ass or plump pair of lips out loud.

At the point where it's happening because I'm incredibly sexually frustrated, it could be construed (slightly accurately) as rather creepy. I'm even creeped out by it. I don't want to be the creepy shameless grunting guy, so I need to sort this out.

Probably it will end up having to wait until I get home. Five days isn't a lot of time, and I need to be soaking up the last bits of Rome and studying for my final, instead of throwing my libido at the brick wall that is the seduction of Italian women.

I actually thought about writing this blog entry last night when I was dancing my ass off, and had the problem of where to place the punchline. As I posted in my last entry, Love Parade was this weekend. My mind is reeling at the monumental task of summarizing my adventure. And adventure it was, for this was not some idyllic light touch feel-good journey of touristy exoticas, this was a venture into the very face of madness, which bears a remarkable resemblance to Jim Carrey on a cocaine binge.

You'll have to forgive my overly verbose prose, dear fans di Italia, I'm ever-so-slightly delirious. Remember that hotel room I was going on about, the one I was going to put my bag in and use to hide from the craziness of the parade? Yeah, I got scammed. The accor hotel chain website linked me to a hotel profile in Dortmund, then changed the city my hotel was in on the confirmation page before I clicked to transact. My stupid for not reviewing it more closely beforehand, but I was excited. The hotel was in Hagan, 20 km from Dortmund in the opposite direction of the airport I would be returning to in Dusseldorf. So, they got my money, but I could honestly care less. I survived the weekend budget intact, and had an amazing and unforgettable time.

I arrived in Dusseldorf an hour and a half late, resulting from a mass exodus clusterfuck of the first wave of Roman residents leaving for the month of August. I took the airtram to the main terminal and caught a 2:00 train to Dortmund. I was literally bouncing in my seat in anticipation, but a small part of me was doubting there would even be anything there when I arrived. Stop by stop my worry grew, until I began trying to think of ways I could make the most of the trip otherwise.

Then we Essen. Hundreds of glammed up people drinking beer and howling soccer chants rushed the train. Happily I kept my seat, because everyone else was sardined in, and it only got worse as we went. Soon we were all laughing as the doors opened on teeming throngs who were confronted with an already firmly entrenched teeming throng on the train. There were arguments, standoffs, and bribes. Oh, how they would have taken a different tack, had they known what would happen next.

An hour into the ride the train began to slow awkwardly, halting to a crawl, then chugging forward again, the braking, until at last we came to a full stop in between platforms. Nobody thought much of it, this was Europe after all, public transit is as solid as a horiscope on a fortune cookie.

Time passed, it got hot. People stopped laughing and smiling. More time passed, and people started to get weak and lean on each other, sweaty and pale. Everyone started yelling and banging on the sides of the cars, and suddenly the doors opened and let in a rush of cool wind, eliciting orgasmic moans and sighs of relief. Outside it was gray and raining, and people hopped out of the car to get some air or smoke. Ten minutes later the conductor came on the intercom and said he could not go any further because the rails were blocked up ahead. I didn't find out until much later that night that the reason the rails were blocked was due to a suicidal teenager jumping in front of the train in ahead of us.

With my holistic senses cranked up to 11, I jumped onto the tracks and followed the crowd. We marched approximately 4 kilometers in the rain, jackets over our heads, stumbling on the rocks covering the tracks. The sky started shitting water on us with a spicy curry's late night vengeance, and we started running to a bridge over the tracks about a half mile away. Under the bridge a group was already gathering, singing more soccer chants.

After the rain let up the mass of people split their paths. Some walked on to the next train station down the tracks, others opted to climb the bridge and find a bus to Dortmund in the city, knowing no trains would be going to the next station anyway. I went into the city, and started the English poll ("Do you speak English?"). Combining broken English contributions from five different people, I was able to ascertain that was a way to bus to Dortmund from the main terminal in the city, so we all stood at a bus stop. After milling about for another hour, people began to get restless and creative, and several guys carried police blockades they found down one of the streets onto the road we were on and started dancing around them.

Wiser party hopefuls started walking away, and having already seen a lot of news reports that started out with drunk people doing similar stupid things, I followed. I hadn't even gone 200 yards when four police vans full of cops hauled ass down the street toward the mob. I walked faster.

Ahead a new group was forming at a tram, and here I finally met some people who spoke decent enough English. After finding out I was from Texas, they vowed to get me to Love Parade no matter what, and so we went by Tram to the main station, then by bus to Dortmund, then through four kilometers of hundreds of thousands of wet and disgruntled people, uphill and through the mud. Having to tote my bag everywhere didn't make it easier, since we had to push through crowds to make any real progress. I missed the parade, but wasn't too upset about it since everyone got rained on while it happened. The rain kept returning in sporadic torrents, and everyone would scramble from the streets like cockroaches, hiding massed against the building walls, then return when there was a pause.

We arrived at the main sound system at around 6:30, and the show was just starting. The area was a huge parking lot filled with a sea of people and vendors, with guys climbing and perching atop 50 foot portable construction halogen lights and waving German flags. We pushed our way to about the middle of the area, still nearly a football field away from the stage, and tried to clear ourselves some space while DJ Rush played. Moby went on next, followed by Richie Hawtin, Arman Van Burin, Paul Van Dyke, and a few popular German heavy hitters who's names I couldn't remember. They cycled the acts so each DJ only played for 20 minutes, playing their best peak mixes, then going on to the next.

Now for the punchline. Underworld.

Underworld closed out the night. To some this may not be as significant, but for me hearing the group who made the very first electronic music song I ever listened to (during my first psychadelic experience) was fairly epic, especially when they performed Born Slippy. The Germans who had adopted me were overwhelmed by my enthusiasm, since none of them were familiar with Underworld.

After Underworld was done, someone named Paul Pope did a "Sea of Lights" show with a ridiculously huge array of lights, spot lights stacked 8 high and 12 across, with fireworks, lasers, and color filters. It was a visual jamboree, and put me in mind of the burn at Flipside this year.

The city shut down the sound at midnight, and the crowd started to break apart back toward the train station. My hosts wanted to go home, so I resolved to follow them to the train station so I would know how to get there, then find myself an afterparty. With a piece of paper I etch-e-sketched myself a little map of the town, noting all of the afterparties I passed along the way. Parting with my new friends after exchanging email addresses, I had a huge dinner of sausages and beer, mellowed out for a bit and tended to the toe I ripped open that morning on a door.

Revived and refreshed, I hit the best looking afterparty (largest line, smallest venue, second story balcony overlooking one of the city squares), where happily I coat checked my bag. After trucking it around all day, I felt like I could jump over the moon, and proceeded to drink red bulls and dance my ass off, only stopping to switch rooms, for seven straight hours. The bar had three large rooms, with the Ministry of Sound playing in the one I spent the entire night in. My devotion on the dance floor was rewarded with comped drinks, CD samplers, and difficult conversations with cute girls.

At 7:30 they shut down that afterparty, and I left to find more trouble. As I walked out of the club, I heard a guy on the sidewalk say, "I'm from Australia," then someone he was talking to say, "Cool, I'm from London," so I walked up and said, "Awesome, I'm from America!" That was how I met Fletch (the Australian), who was probably the nearest person to Tucker Max I've ever met. Him and his traveling buddy Brendon invited me along with two girls they had just met, and together we went to an afterparty at a pool. It was great in theory, but when we got there we discovered it was 30 euro to get in. Fletch tried for a while to find a way to sneak in, but eventually we resolved to get wasted and go to a playground instead. Drinking beers, the girls gave us a tour of the city, and eventually we went back to their apartment where they let me clean up and change out of my mud covered clothes. By this point it was 1 in the afternoon, and I bid adieu to the party and headed to the station. Brendon went along, since he was tired as well, and we road back South together, talking with a German teenager about Hitler (he brought it up).

Germans are very sensitive about the way the world perceives them, at least the majority of those I spoke with. Many of them mentioned that Germany was not the way it used to be, and that Nazi sentiments were not popular there, except in some radical political parties who never actually got seated in offices. I never volunteered the subject to them, but they usually brought it up somehow when they realized I was American. I felt bad, especially since the country I was from had more to answer for currently than there's did.

After a long train ride I got to the airport and flew back to Rome. I brought my roomates back two six packs of German beer, since the poor bastards always buy 4 euro Heinekens in Rome. All in all, it was an awesome 30 hours in Germany, but I definitely want to return. If anything, it helped affirm for me the plans I've been laying in my head over the last week, I want to return to Italy next year and live somewhere more rural for much longer, through some program that can set me up with some little shit job to get by. Then I can work here, save money up, and travel to a lot of different countries, all while firming up my Italian even more.

Damn, that was a long post. Sorry. Shiny nickels to everyone who actually read all of that.

-Sean

Special Request

This is a specially requested update, because Ashley is leaving to go camping in a few hours and needs to know what's going on. Lucky for Ashley, even though I didn't go to school today, I stopped in to see if my bank account had been supplied with more widgets.

It hasn't.

I just got back from the beach, I'm all tan and relaxed. I swam out to this rock barrier that the town built there hundreds of years ago so that armadas of ships couldn't attack directly, and would have to approach one ship at a time. I cut my foot. Happily, it was a small cut, since I'm GOING TO LOVE PARADE TOMORROW MORNING!!!!

I didn't take any pictures at the beach, but everyone else did, so I'll just get the pictures of me posing in my silver booty shorts from one of them. I'm about to go to this Irish pub Allison and crew introduced me to last night and play cards whilst drinking cider. Happy about cider. Happy happy happy.

Happy about tomorrow. Fucking ecstatic. Don't even know how to control myself, really. I spent the last hour in my room utilizing space in my backpack for every absolutely necessary item. Got my first aid, toiletries, jeans and second pair of dancing shoes, t-shirt, jacket (it's 60 degrees there right now), and various protein bars and a sack of almonds. Adderal and Ambien are a must. Can't bring my italian books, so I'm making flash cards tonight to do on the plane on my way there.

Downside to this weekend. Monday I have to do an oral presentation on a picture, the theme: A moment out of time. Five minutes I have to spend talking about this picture, five minutes! She even said five to eight! How do you spend eight minutes talking about a picture in a language you barely comprehend without notes? And with maybe three brain cells clicking together, on top of that?

So I've got to bone up tonight, big time. Hardcore. Bone.

With cider.

Can'twaitcan'twaitcan'twaitcan'twait!

-Sean