ZEE PAPERS

Diving Deep into the Depths of Dumb

I finally did it.  A) Got married (Back in 2013. Yay me!), B) Boarded the bureaucratic slippery slalom slope known as European Residency.  Why not.  I've lived in Europe off-and-on for decades, never wanting to fully commit.  Always feeling daring not doing the paperwork.  Bureaucracy is for suckers, I've always said.  Sure, I knew that it would be a colossal waste of time (hence entire empires built on easy immigration for the right price, mostly for yuppie scummery and the like). The rest of us have to take our chances with the riffraff.  And by riffraff, I don't mean the unwashed hordes of Syrians pushing their way into the bowels of Europa, forcing her to slam her doors shut tighter than a frog's asshole (and that shit's watertight. Word.).  I mean the bureaucrats themselves.  It's refreshing to note that all the stereotypes about bureaucrats in the States ring true here as well: a finer class of classless idiots I have never seen. I had no idea this slalom course would be so fraught with idiocy, incompetence and downright ty-volery.

Firstly: all of your research and preparation is for naught.  They will find a problem with a semicolon in your rental contract and jam it up your actual colon.  And then you won't have enough passport photos.  And they won't be the correct size.  And in your picture, your shirt won't have a collar.  And you'll be smiling.  This is serious fucking business.  Do not smile.  I expected all of this, and as I am generally free several days a week in the winter, I just decided to dive into the depths of dumb and see how just long I could hold my breath.  I started the process before Christmas.  It is nearly Easter and  I have still not found that hidden Easter egg known as zee papers.  Jesus H. Lapdancing Christ. I shouldn't have started this process anywhere near Christian holidays in an atheist country.  I've been back several times, each time with more and more and more and...

Why won't they give me zee fucking papers?  Yes, I'm a gawd damned Yank whose ancestors fled the dark ages of Europa and finally settled into the deserts of Central California.  But I'm married to a Eurobabe!  This should be easy-peasy, right?  Nope. Apparently, there's a problem: I'm Japanese.  I know.  Who knew?  Well, THEY did.  The fine collectors of all my precious documents, upon closely inspecting all of them, decided in their infinite wisdom that I am in fact a Japanese citizen.  I even have a certified letter stating this fact clearly.  Even though they have copies of my U.S. Passport, marriage certificate, yadayadayada, they 'somehow' confused me with a person of Japanese persuasion.  I think I'm turning Japanese, I think I'm turning Japanese, I really think so.

'Dear Mr. Robinskon.' 

RobinSKON?  Really?  Even if you started your day in typical old school Czech style with a six pack of beer and a bag of hot dogs for breakfast, you couldn't possibly think that 'Robinskon' is a Japanese name.

'There is a problem with your doorbell, so the foreigner police could not surprise you with a random visit, the aim of which was to enter your flat and ransack the dump, see if your wife is not just a cleverly-made-up blow-up doll—and to look for Syrian refugees.  Please correct this oversight immediately or we will not be able to process your application for residency.  And BTW: you're fuckin' Japanese. We really think so.

Sincerely, Your Immigration Tards.'

Well.  I beg to differ.  I have never been to Japan in my entire life and I hate sushi.  I am whiter than a yeti in a snowstorm—fighting Tilda Swinton.  Not to mention that I'm 6 foot 5 inches and 280 pounds. They don't make Japanese folks with such proportions.  Even the sumo wrestlers are short.  My Immigration Tards even gave me a deadline to correct all of my architectural and racial issues.  They must be satisfied by April 18, so I called them for the earliest appointment.  The kindly tard on the phone said that the earliest appointment was April 20.  Naturally.  Such is the nature of the tardbeast.   A late appointment would not do. So I rolled up my considerably long sleeves, grabbed the reams of zee papers issued to me thus far, and headed down to the office for the fourth time to sit in the line for a full day with the rest of the unwashed foreign hordes.  At this point, the security guard should give me a high five.

At the entrance to the Tardis, I showed my letter to the man in the booth.  I pointed out the sentence in the certified letter where it declares in no uncertain terms that I am certainly Japanese.  The man and the booth could not possibly be an actual bureaucrat, because he cracked a smile.  Then he looked me up and down, checked the letter again and declared "Well, obviously this is some kind of mistake. It even says here that they recorded your U.S. Passport number and I.D."

"Yeah?"

"So just go upstairs with the corrected information and and wait for your number to be called."

By 'corrected information' he meant my new flat and rental contract—and my honky white ass, to prove once and for all that I'm not Japanese.  I didn't have the stones to tell the man that my 'new' flat has a doorbell system from the dark ages, and that there would be no chance—yet again—for the foreigner police to ransack the dump in search of blow up dolls and Syrians.  That's ok. They would find that out soon enough.  And they'll make me come back.

Upon climbing my way out of the Depths of Dumb, I thought about something else the very non-bureaucratic sentinel at the gates of the Tardis told me:

"You're not Japanese."

"Ya THINK?"

"This is some kind of mistake.  You could complain."  Then he handed me a small strip of paper with an email address and a phone number.

Complain?  Ninja please.  I've got the biggest complaint form in the whole wide world.

It's called my blog.

---

Stayed tuned!  Will Big Sir be shipped off to Japan and forced to eat seaweed? 
Or will he finally be given the right to live in peace with his Eurobabe in their substandard, rusty-doorbell-adorned dump in the industrial suburbs of Prague?

We Can Be Heroes

Just for one day.

HEROES! GET YER HEROES! TODAY ONLY! screamed the newspaper salesman in my head. One downside to a 20 year media boycott (no telly, no radio, no 'news' other than online) is that I heard about Bowie's death via my fb wall. Days after. So I can't remember the exact time and place. I remember when Elvis died: I was in the back seat of Dad's car and the news oozed through the radio off the tongue of one of those sleazy, doped up rock n roll radio announcers to the backdrop of 'Moody Blue.' As well it should have. Those were the days. Now and forever, instead of remembering the exact time one of my heroes (like Bowie) died, I'll remember a homogeneous blob of news McNuggets served up via (anti)social media.

I don't have a telly, but I still managed to 'acquire/finagle' some American late night comedy shows. All of them had Bowie bits (not 'bits' as in 'pieces' of him, my sick UK/Irish friends). Memorials, footage, music, all of it. They showed flowers and candles on Bowie's Hollywood star, outside his house, outside all of his former houses ever—including his Berlin residence (my auld pal Der Irische Berliner was there). Though I was in Prague at the time of hearing of Bowie's passing, I will never forget my Berlin-Bowie connection.

It was early December in 2008, the last day of my Scouting For the Next tour. It was the end of my Decade of Decadence in Prague and I needed a new country to violate. I was on a 3 day bender, a tiki bar tour of Berlin with one of my Pragueish-American (that's a nationality), Prague-tiki-bar-owning friends. We were hung-the-fuck-over, sprawled out in the lobby of a Berlin-Kreuzberg youth hostel, awaiting our return to Prague. They were playing Bowie on the hostel speakers. Then I heard the softly warbling voice of Bowie transform, Reichisch-dictator-like, into ICCCCHHH!!!! ICH BIN DER KÖNIG! UND DUUUUUUU!!!! DU KÖNIGEN!!! Bowie was screaming 'Heroes.' In Deutsch (Deutsch must be screamed to be truly effective)!  At the time, I had no idea that Bowie had lived/loved/recorded in Berlin. HELDEN done in Deutsch confirmed it: only non-Americans bother to learn the language of their host countries. The truly great ones even learn to sing it (though to be honest, English lends itself better to lyrics. I mean ICCCCCHHHH? Really? I fucking LOVE IT).

While I age ungracefully, wideness setting in the body and mind, I remember my heroes, and where I was when they died. Most of them died while I was abroad. Bukowski, Hunter S. Thompson, DeForest Kelley (Bones!), and Bowie. Most of my heroes are/were rebels, outlaws and misfits. I would have it no other way. What put the choke in my throat about Bowie's death wasn't the flowers, the mourners or the non-stop Bowie-a-thon music. It was a scribbled note left on Bowie's Hollywood star, which bore a quote by another famous misfit, Guillermo del Toro:

"Bowie existed so all of us misfits learned that oddity was a precious thing."

And so he did. And I'm feeling pretty fucking proud to be an oddity right about now.

Bir Sir (when he was just a little sir) saw Bowie perform live in Mountain View some time in the 90s.  It's all a haze.