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I'm a biologist with an interest in political history, European history, and film.
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Activity Summary
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Reviews Written: 21
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Member Visits: 582
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Total Visits: 6,923
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About e2holmes
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About Me
I spent much of my youth tramping all over the U.S. -- as a child of the flower children. When I think back on those crazy years, I remember the people I met. Or should I say characters, most were definitely characters. Even as a youth, characters fascinated me. In the mid-1980s, I left to live in West Berlin for awhile and spent every free weekend in East Berlin. I was not really doing anything. I would walk the city and sit and just watch. Something about the crushing feeling of greyness fascinated me -- perhaps in a morbid way, I can't really say. West Berlin with it's glitzy lights and action held no attraction. The human spirit subdued by that atmosphere of grey and fear that hung palpably in the air in East Berlin is what drew me in. I used to ride the East Berlin subway all night, having purposely missed the last crossing back into West Berlin over Checkpoint Charlie [a stupid and dangerous thing to do, but I was 18]. I loved talking with the characters one runs into in the middle of the night on a subway system. I loved that experience of walking down the aisle, for a brief moment you look into a strangers eyes, you can't say what it is, but you sit down and talk about your lives, and then your stop arrives and you part. If I close my eyes, I can still remember the flickering subway lights, the dirty seats, and always the same whispered question "Can I look at your passport?". I never knew how to feel as an East Berliner thumbed through my passport, smiling wanly at the stamps from all over Europe. Because of that little book, I was free to travel and they were trapped. I still don't know how to feel about that. Empty cliches seem to make light of the hands we are dealt in life.
In the middle of winter, I left alone from East Berlin on a trip taking only the local trains (the ones that stop at every little village) behind the Iron Curtain through East Germany, through Czechoslovakia, and down the length of Yugoslavia. It was like living in a Eastern European noir film for a week. When I watch Bela Tarr's movies now, I have to laugh. It was just like that. I have so many strange memories from that trip. Sleeping in the Prague train station with a big group of workers from North Vietnam always comes to mind. We slept in a huddle (it was winter and cold) on one side of the station, and every couple of hours, the police would come and kick us awake, and then we'd all stumble to the other side of the hall and collapse back on the floor. Those guys and I were from opposite ends of the universe, but at that moment we were united on that grimy floor, spooning together to stay warm and cursing the police. And I still remember, the train stopping in the middle of Yugoslavia far from any stations in the dead of night, and getting pulled off the train with a small group of I assume non-Yugoslavians although we never spoke, and standing out in the cold and the blowing snow, for what seemed like forever, standing there half expecting the train the pull away and hoping to God I didn't look anything like their idea of a CIA agent or a corrupting capitalist imperialist. A week later I was sitting on a tiny beach in the south of Crete at the end of that long journey and realized all of a sudden that I had left all my money on the shower on the ferry from the mainland. Laughing about it later with an Austrian I had met, he proceeded to give me a lecture about Americans not knowing the value of money and that I surely had some rich daddy to bale me out, otherwise how could I laugh about losing $1000 dollars. I tried to explain that I had lost every penny I had in the world and that I didn't have anyone to bale me out -- that I would have to get by on whatever food I could find in dumpsters until I got back to Germany where I had a job. I couldn't understand how that could not seem funny -- I mean what else can you do but laugh at such a fundamentally stupid predicament. It was obvious once again that AMERICAN was stamped on my forehead -- the world had me pigeon-holed even though it didn't know the first thing about me.
That's one of the reasons I blog, and I consider posting on epinions a form of blogging -- trying to connect on an individual level and make my own minor salvo against the American media that broadcasts to the world "This is what Americans are like" -- intellectually shallow, materially obsessed, politically unaware. That's not my America.
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