I need to stop "blogging" when I've been "drinking." It's "embarrassing."

Mein Mutter ist Mein Herz

What do you get when you combine 5 Turkish girls, 1 Turkish guy, 1 Polish girl, and 1 unshaven American boy? Why, you get the members of my Beginning German class, of course. Thats right folks, its a multicultural world, and it doesnt get any more multicultulural than the German curses at the Fachhochschule in Ludwigshafen, Germany. Weve got Poles, Turks, Bulgarians, Spaniards, Lithuanians, Dutch, Russians, and a Bulgarian kid who was raised in Turkey. Im never heard so much Turkish in my goddamn life. So far the only thing Ive learned how to say in Turkish is, "My name is Mark," and "Im freezing" (its quite cold here in Ludwigshafen). Today we went on a bus tour of the city and hopefully this Saturday well be going to Heidelburg, a University town that boasts scenic streets and a formidable castle.

German, for those of you who have never studied it, is one difficult language. I mean, people say "Oh its a lot like English" but thats kind of like saying that Spanish is a lot like Latin. Which, if youve studied both Spanish and Latin (which I havent) you know is a ridiculous statement. German is fucking hard. In German instead of saying "I want to speak English" you say "I want in English to speak." But thats just the tip of the iceberg. Then youve got cases, which are something I cant even attempt to explain as I have no idea what in hell they are. The moral of the story is this: English is rad, and, We should all move to Texas. Ignorance is bliss....

So anyway, thats a little update on the goings on here in the hinterlands. Once again if you are in these parts and want to meet up just send me a little message. We can go to France and eat hella cheap brie, or something. (Actually, the brie in Germany is hella cheap as well. A euro 15 for a huge wedge. Damn, doo!)

-Boosh Clown

Partei in Deutschland!

Boosh Clown is in Germany!!! Zee Germans!!!! I'm sitting on the couch I'm currently surfing drinking a Jever and wondering what the 80's party I'm going to tonight is going to be like. 80's party in Germany? I'm kind of scared/really scared. Hopefully the Jever will kick in soon and I wont be worried about shaking my hips to German techno.

Last night I went to a bar and everyone was drinking Beck's, and today I went on a tour that was conducted entirely in German. I don't speak German. I know how to say, "My name is Mark," "How much does this cost?" and "I shit my pants," but I don't understand any of the responses.

Tomorrow I am off to Ludwigshafen to do a week-long language course and try to get my head wrapped around this barbaric tongue. Then it's more traveling through Germany, the Czech Republic, Poland and eventually a flight to Scotland where I will drink low-grade beer and attempt not to wake up in a ditch.

I think the Jever is kicking in. This is a good thing because before I started drinking beer I was really jittery from some coffee I drank earlier. I don't drink coffee, and when I do, I turn into a madman. I start talking 100 words a minute making non-sensical remarks about topics I am not well versed in until someone tells me to shut up. Tonight I talked for a good four minutes about the song "Everything I Do" by Bryan Adams before I finally started shaking and had to leave the room.

Hope all is well in the motherland! Is this the motherland?

-Boosh Clown

P.S. Oh and I'm also listening to "Just Dance" by Lady Gaga. Just thought you should know...

(.)

I'm going to Europe tomorrow¹.

¹!!!!!!!!!!!!

Glory

I am so disappointed with myself for writing "hit up the Czech Republic" last night.

The plan has changed completely. I now plan to hit up the Czech Republic, then Poland, then fly to Glasgow to hang out with my kind of friend/weirdo/kid who's slang is hella weak and hella needs to practice and probably has a hella Scottish accent by now and has forgotten everything that is good and just in the world (see: everything George Bush). Anyway I'll go to Scotland and then bum my way down to London (see: drive on the left side of the road), hang out with a knight named Sir Lee Brown, cross the English Channel, stay with young eccentric couchsurfer types in Paris, then head to Toulouse for fun time. If you would like to find me just like for the guy wearing 7 pairs of boxers, 6 pairs of socks, and 2 sweatshirts in the Wroclaw airport because I a will have to take a bunch of shit out of my bag to make it an acceptable size for carry on and thus have to put it on my person. It's going to be one very cozy plane ride. See you there!
-Boosh Clown
P.S. Disregard this blog. I have drank (drunk?) entirely too much wine tonight.

good tutor needed

I thought I'd check out Craigslist to see if there were any jobs in Germany and came across one of the funnier jobs I've ever seen. It starts off pretty normal with the "Maths, English, French" and then starts to get awesome with the inclusion of "Italia." Apparently this guy wants someone to teach his daughter "Italy." Then he goes on to mention about fifty other things. "Computer science, Arts, Singing, Dancing, MORALS." He wants someone to teach his daughter morals! My roommate Dan just said, "Why don't you show up at their house with a copy of the Brothers Grimm, or something." I actually don't really know what that means, but I'm sure it's really funny.
Anyway, if you haven't already clicked on the link above, get on it.
Auf weidersehen!

Chevy Cavalier

I am going to Germany in six days. If anyone would like to go to Oktoberfest with me, contact me, and we will drink some beer together. Like brothers. Or brother and sister, if you are a girl.
-Boosh Clown

P.S. Also, I would really like to work while I am in Europe this fall, so contact me if you have any ideas about that, too.
Some things to consider, though: I don't want to go to Spain because I have already been there, I don't want to go to the UK because I don't want to speak English, I don't want to learn Italian, I don't like the French, Spaniards have funny accents (reason number two, I suppose), Polish people sound like they have deep voices, Switzerland is just a little too neutral, Italians are weirdos, Greeks are hairy, the Dutch are insane, and Flemish is a barbaric toungue.
Thanks for your help!

P.P.S. Poop.

P.P.P.S. (!)

T.S.I.E.F.P.T.P.P.P.S. (This Script is Even Further Past the Post Post Post Script) Donnybrook.

The Smoking and the Happiness

I hate tourists. Not so much foreign tourists. The worst tourists are the ones from right here in the good ol' US of A. In Seattle you can find them on the waterfront, gleefully feeding the seagulls outside of Ivar’s in their San Diego Zoo t-shirts and matching fanny packs. Ever time I see them with French fries in their outstretched hands, I can’t help but fantasize that a huge pterodactyl/seagull hybrid will come and pluck one away, the tourist shrieking as his/her camera wielding, slightly obese buddies look on in terror.

There is something about American tourists that prompt them to put on every piece of tacky garb they’ve ever acquired before embarking on any new voyage. I imagine them standing in their room the night before. “Hmmmm, think I’ll just put on this Disneyland sweatshirt…maybe my neck fanny pack, too…oops, don’t want to forget the SeaWorld hat I got last summer….perfect.” And then they leave the house, with the singular task of finding at least one piece of tacky garb to bring home and add to the collection.

I took the clipper last week to visit my girlfriend in Victoria. The clipper is a great place for tourist watching. As soon as I got in line to check in a man wearing a Texas Longhorns hat sidled up behind me. He had the sort of bug-eyed stare that suggested a dim countenance and possibly too much time spent working on a Holstein farm. He held his son by the hand who was wearing a New York Yankees hat, and I couldn’t help thinking, “Man, Texans are the worst.”
In an extremely close second, however, are tourists from the Deep South. While boarding I overheard a woman behind say to her friend, "I got enuff big in here if yew wanna store it in mah purse." It took her about 15 seconds to get the sentence out, and she actually used the phrase, "enough big" to denote that she had enough room. I briefly wondered what planet I was on.
Past the final ticket-takers, I made my way to the boat, which sat in the calm waters of Elliott Bay, sitting very still and looking very elegant, and just when I thought all matter of inane comments had been expelled, the man in front of me stopped to ask an attendant a question.

"Is it a non-stop sailing to Victoria?"

The woman looked at him as if he had just stepped on a puppy.
Non-stop. Non stop? To Victoria? Where would we possibly stop? It's all water. "It's a good thing you asked, sir," I imagined her saying, "because we'll actually be making a brief pit-stop at a floating island fortress not unlike the set of Kevin Costner's Waterworld to drop off some dry land and barter for exotic plants. However, only those with gills surgically implanted behind their ears will be let off the boat. Enjoy the sailing!"

Qualms with fellow man aside, the clipper is an amazing experience. It is a fast and efficient. A trip that would take me seven hours by bus and ferry via Tsawwassen and Swartz Bay on the clipper takes just a scant three.

Once onboard, it is easy to appreciate the things that make riding the clipper much different than riding the bigger, cruise vessel-like Washington State ferries. The clippers small size makes you feel like you're actually on a boat. It is actually affected by waves and swells and actually bobs and rolls as a result of them. The other thing that separates it from the Washington State ferries is that it moves really, really fast. The thing absolutely hauls. I don't know how fast it actually goes, but on the water anything faster than 20 knots feels like 70. After we got going I went up to the sun deck, where it is impossible to hear anything but the roar of the engines, and impossible not to marvel at the two magnificent rooster tails they send spraying far back into the wake.

Upon descending from the sun deck I was accosted by a wild-eyed man wearing a flannel shirt who asked, "How do you get out?" His exasperated tone suggested a fairly recent relationship with a pair of handcuffs, and I quickly motioned toward the stairs. "Upstairs? Upstairs is the smoking?" but before I could nod he had bolted past me. As I walked back to my seat I chuckled at how he had said, "the smoking" as if it were some sort of destination, like a theme park or a baseball stadium. What other words could I use like that? "I'm sorry, Mark can't come to the phone right now, he's in the pooping. May I take a message?"

It has been my experience aboard any type of conveyance that carries more than five passengers that at some point, a wailing infant will be situated within at least one row of me. This is a law as immutable as gravity, and I can now add "ferry" to the list. As we entered the Strait of Juan de Fuca, I had finally begun to secure a few moments of deep, blissful sleep, most likely inhabited by a horde of nubile, scantily-clad girls, when I was awakened by the a shrill scream coming from the seat in front of me. I jolted upright at the noise, which sounded something like a mix between a troop of mating chimpanzees and a recently-pulled fire alarm. The woman in front of me held a baby in her arms and cooed and rocked, but to no avail. Something had made this baby angry, and he was going to tell the entire boat about it.

The most disconcerting thing about the baby, though, was not that it was crying. I expect babies to cry, and would almost be wary if I were to take a trip without one crying, as if God might be playing some sort of strange trick on me, and as soon as I stepped off the bus, plane, or ferry, a thousand strollers might suddenly appear on the horizon and chase me down the street. The most disconcerting thing about this baby is where it had come from. Up until this point I had been monitoring the couple in front of me with casual interest and had never once noticed anything that might have indicated the presence of a human under the age of thirty. And then, as if out of thin air, the woman had a baby in her hands that was screaming as if trying to wake the dead. Where did this baby come from? I wondered. It was as if she had pulled it out of her purse, in which case I wondered why she didn't just put it back, so that at least there would be a thin layer of suede to muffle the noise.

Just as the babies screams began burrowing into my inner ear the ferry was met by a set of swells making their way in from the Pacific Ocean, and after about two minutes I was hopelessly seasick. Seasickness, if you've never experienced it, is a wretched feeling, not unlike getting punched in the lower abdomen after eating a hearty dinner. I probably wouldn't have felt seasick, but I was writing, and like reading in a car, writing makes it worse. However, I wanted to keep writing, and forced myself to do so, just so that when I later copied down the words, "I feel like I'm going to vomit right now," I wouldn't really be lying about the "right now" part.

The good news about the heinous rocking and listing of the boat is that it seemed to lull the baby in front of me to sleep, a small but welcome consolation considering I could've described how I was feeling at the moment using the words, "mind-bending nausea." I had foolishly passed up taking the Dramamine that was offered for sail at the beginning of the trip and now wished in vain that I had. The feelings of malaise brought to mind a similar, albeit much longer ordeal last year when I sailed with ten other wayward backpackers from Panama to Colombia on a 38-foot metal boat piloted by a man missing the ends of several fingers who kept a spider monkey as a pet. That trip was over 40 hours and I felt sick on land for several days after, so this I could handle, I told myself.

Finally, the swells subsided and we made our turn into the inner harbor. Victoria is an indescribably beautiful city. While only three hours from Seattle and an hour and a half from Port Angeles, it feels like a different world: cosmopolitan, colonial, European. After clearing Canadian customs I made my way into the bright sunlit and jumped into the air, clicking the heels of my pink and yellow Creative Recreation shoes together to demonstrate my joy at having arrived and finally being able to distance myself from the yahoos with whom I had shared the boat. I made my way to Beacon Hill Park and Cook Street Village, and suddenly there wasn't a tourist in sight. Just a quiet green soccer field flanked by two rows of towering Japanese maples. I thought back again to the guy wanting to get to the sun deck to and laughed. How could I describe my new surroundings using ex-con speak?

"Excuse me, Mark can't come to the phone right now. He's in the happiness. Can I take a message?"

It has recently come to my attention that the buses that make up the King County Transit fleet cannot tell the difference between American and Canadian change. Do with this information what you will....

In other news, a message for my roommates: HEY ROOMMATES, as you have probably noticed, we haven't had toilet paper in the downstairs bathroom (see: the only bathroom) for several days. However, what you probably haven't noticed is that I have been using the paper towels from the kitchen to wipe my ass and then disposing of them in the trash can next to the toilet. WELCOME TO LATIN AMERICA, MOTHERFUCKERS!!!!!!!!

I hope everyone has a fun-filled Friday night. Stay safe.

-Boosh Clown

The Tension

There are a lot of reasons to go to Canada. The air is cleaner, the water is cleaner, the streets have less cars, and the University of Victoria has a shit ton of bunnies. But one of the best things about Canada is not any of these clean, "green" things. The best thing about Canada is the word "bum." If you've seen Pineapple Express, you might have noticed that during the extended fight scene between Seth Rogen, Saul, and Red, Seth Rogen exclaims after being hit in the rear end by Red, "Aw! My bum!" This is not because Seth Rogen is proper or because Seth Rogen was trying to be funny; this is because he's Canadian. And Canadians say "bum."

Earlier in the scene, Rogen hurriedly talks about "phoning" someone. He says in an exasperated voice something along the lines of, "He's a fucking liar! He's trying to phone John!" Most people probably did not notice this little sprig of subtlety, but I certainly did, mostly because I have been dating a Canadian for the past 7 months and am now more than ever sensitive to their strange vernacular discharges. Americans would never use "phone" as a verb. We would say "call" exclusively. Canadians say "call" too, but they usually say phone. I suspect this is British, and I suspect I could figure it out in two seconds on the Intranet, but I'm not going to. Instead, I'm going to talk about how much I hate Seth Rogen, and how at the same time I don't really hate him at all and especially after Pineapple Express might even describe him as "kind of funny."

Seth Rogen was born in 1974 in Kelowna, BC to a steel welder and a salmon packer. He was the youngest of five siblings and didn't start acting until the age of 22¹. He made his first standout appearance in 40 Year-Old Virgin, where his most notable line was, "Plant it with your finger." In both Knocked Up² and Superbad he was somewhere between "kind of" and "very" annoying, so I was fully skeptical going into this 9:50 screening of Pineapple Express at the Capitol (al?) 6 Theater in downtown Victoria. But now I am not skeptical. About anything. For the first 30 minutes of the movie, Rogen is his usual self. He seems to be consciously awkward in the hopes that the audience will find it endearing (and it seems that most of the audience does). However, something changes in the final 90 minues of the movie, and I don't really know what that, but either Rogen gets a little funnier, the plot gets a little better, the rest of the cast gets WAY funnier, or the character Red almost makes me pee my pants when he cocks a shotgun and exclaims, "Thug life." Or all four. But something happens, because Rogen gets a lot more bearable, and the movie as a whole becomes (almost) awesome, which I more than I ever could have expected from this movie³.

Sometimes when I sit down to write I fully intend to write about something in particular and then end up writing about something completely different. Today I fully intended to write about an herbal tea made by Celestial Seasonings called "Tension Tamer" that contains catnip as it's eighth ingredient and with which I have become completely obsessed. But then I started talking about "bum" and using "phone" as a verb and I completely forgot to talk about the box of tea sitting just to the right of my girlfriend's laptop that features a princess draped in a red dress sitting atop a subdued, fire-breathing dragon. I have been drinking several cups a day of this tea for the last few weeks and have come to fear two things: A) I might be addicted, B) I might be losing my mind. I was completely blown away when I saw catnip on the ingredients. I didn't even know catnip was safe for human consumption. I'm still not entirely convinced it is. My friend White Mike has a cat named Raffles who eats wild catnip in his backyard and one time became so hypnotized by the delightful herb that he passed out and fell off the 3-foot retaining wall that separates their garden from the lawn. And now I am consuming catnip. And I feel a little like Raffles.

So that's my take on Pineapple express and also my take on Celestial Seasoning's "Tension Tamer." So far today I haven't had a single glass and am semi-confident I will make it through the whole day without it. It's better than making it through the whole day within it. The Tension Tamer. The Tension...

-Boosh Clown

¹The previous two sentences (are) could be completely false.
²Though this is somewhat unnecessary, I would like to state for the record that I did not think Knocked Up was a great movie. In fact, I thought it was kind of bad. However, most girls seem to love this movie with every inch of their existence. I have no idea why. Girls must understand pregnancy better or something.
³I would have been enthralled by anything better than "horrible."

Reader comments:

John, from Fayetteville, NC, writes:
Hey Boosh- I stumbled across your website because I'm a huge Hilary Duff fan and noticed you have mentioned her several times on your blog and, um, I have some news for you: No one wants to hear what kind of tea you drink, or what kind of tea you are "obsessed" with, as you so "cutely" put it. Your blog makes me want to gnaw off my own arm.
-John Boy

Missing In Acton

Mathangi Arulpragasam has more records than the KGB, and hella visas, and thinks gun shots are cool. Fortunately, so do we (think gun shots are cool). We, however, don't have that many visas. I have a visa from 2004 from when I went to Spain but I don't think it's valid anymore.