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      "body": "Congratulations @balthorsar! You received a personal award!\n\n<table><tr><td>https://steemitimages.com/70x70/http://steemitboard.com/@balthorsar/birthday2.png</td><td>Happy Birthday! - You are on the Steem blockchain for 2 years!</td></tr></table>\n\n<sub>_You can view [your badges on your Steem Board](https://steemitboard.com/@balthorsar) and compare to others on the [Steem Ranking](https://steemitboard.com/ranking/index.php?name=balthorsar)_</sub>\n\n\n**Do not miss the last post from @steemitboard:**\n<table><tr><td><a href=\"https://steemit.com/steemitboard/@steemitboard/use-your-witness-votes-and-get-the-community-badge\"><img src=\"https://steemitimages.com/64x128/https://cdn.steemitimages.com/DQmTugCUsoXX762vg1CuHRrpnPbfnjPogp8iCGv7F2kSVuj/image.png\"></a></td><td><a href=\"https://steemit.com/steemitboard/@steemitboard/use-your-witness-votes-and-get-the-community-badge\">Use your witness votes and get the Community Badge</a></td></tr></table>\n\n###### [Vote for @Steemitboard as a witness](https://v2.steemconnect.com/sign/account-witness-vote?witness=steemitboard&approve=1) to get one more award and increased upvotes!",
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      "body": "Congratulations @balthorsar! You received a personal award!\n\n<table><tr><td>https://steemitimages.com/70x70/http://steemitboard.com/@balthorsar/birthday1.png</td><td>Happy Birthday! - You are on the Steem blockchain for 1 year!</td></tr></table>\n\n<sub>_[Click here to view your Board](https://steemitboard.com/@balthorsar)_</sub>\n\n\n**Do not miss the last post from @steemitboard:**\n<table><tr><td><a href=\"https://steemit.com/carnival/@steemitboard/carnival-2019\"><img src=\"https://steemitimages.com/64x128/http://i.cubeupload.com/rltzHT.png\"></a></td><td><a href=\"https://steemit.com/carnival/@steemitboard/carnival-2019\">Carnival Challenge - Collect badge and win 5 STEEM</a></td></tr></table>\n\n###### [Vote for @Steemitboard as a witness](https://v2.steemconnect.com/sign/account-witness-vote?witness=steemitboard&approve=1) and get one more award and increased upvotes!",
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      "body": "My friend:\nYou are a great man, funny and nice and oh so smart! You are a great fucking catch!\n\nMe:\nno I am not\nmaybe I will be\nbut I definitely am not\nI am a very hurt, abused, and unfortunately because of these experiences of powerlessness and violence, a very volatile and hurtful person to those nearest and dearest to me.",
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      "body": "Just a depressive thought - II\n\nI just came back from having a little walk outside. I walked down the promenade alongside the Rhine. There were quite a lot of people out as well. No wonder, it's really hot today, the sun is burning down on all of us, everybody's off work and want to enjoy these first glimpses of the summer in our cold country. And yet, I saw something that struck me and it brought me to this point of not only wanting and needing to write, but actually overcoming this phase of feeling without any energy that I've been passing through for more than a month now. I saw a woman slapping a girl, 3, maybe 4 years old, hard on her bum. Presumably, the woman was the girl's mother, but her slap was so vigorous, so aggressive and combined with so much shaming and spiteful speech, that I couldn't help but think about it for the entire rest of my little walk. But why did it shock me to such an extent? Half a year ago I would not have liked seeing something like this, but that would've probably been the end of my reaction to this woman's aggression. But I've read so much during the last half a year about how I was raised that seeing something like this now really pissed me off.\n\nAs I've stated before, my girlfriend, my wife to be, left me the week before last Christmas. And I had such a hard time understanding her logic behind her actions, her breaking-up from the left field, that I wondered what I was carrying around with me that made her feel so bad in this relationship, that she saw ghosting me, the man that she had loved so much, as her only way of getting better. And this emotional turmoil turned to be the champagne cork on the bottle of my suppressed memories. And after it had popped, everything came flooding out. But in contrast to my earlier break-ups where I had blamed my then ex-girlfriends for everything and didn't want to accept any of the blame, shoving the cork back in, this time I embraced the opportunity this horrific shock brought me, and continued swirling the bottle about, let everything come out and get everything out.\n\nI wrote my mother a postcard, starting it with \"Dear Mother, yes, you've read correctly, I am calling you mother now\". Because I felt, I knew, that there was something essential missing from my life, something that belonged to me, something that was ripped out of my chest against my will. And I figured, actually having a mother-child-relationship would be a good starting point for finding an emotional balance. Because I never knew how to address my mother. She had left when I was not even three years old, and ever since – for the past 26 years – I had maybe seen her for an entirety of 365 days, possibly less. And I never knew how to call her. My father only ever referred to her as \"the feminist\" with such revulsion that it actually makes me cringe until this day, whenever I hear the word \"feminist.\" Her name was never uttered in my father's house. It was basically forbidden, even punishable. So whenever I saw her, or during the few times that we talked on the phone, or whenever I wrote her a letter or email, I simply did not know how to call her. Even as a little boy I knew that \"hey feminist\" was probably a stupid way to address your mother, but I simply had forgotten the word \"mother\", or so I thought.\n\nAfter she had received the postcard she called me and we had, for the first time in our lives, an honest conversation about us as related people, about our needs, our wishes and our pasts. We talked for three hours during which I told her that I was going to ask the district court in my hometown for a copy of my parents' divorce decree. I told her that I wanted to find everything out, I wanted to understand what was wrong with me, what had happened to me and how it had changed me, damaged me. And how I could stop anything like what I had done from ever happening again. I knew, and I stated it repeatedly, that I had hurt my now Ex-Girlfriend in some way that I couldn't quite grasp yet. But it was not important that I hadn't done it unintentionally. I was still at fault for hurting her. Often and arrogantly.\n\nMy mother told me that she had an entire folder, filled ad nauseam with everything even remotely with her breaking-up with my father, the divorce and the subsequent custody battle, just lying around there. She offered to hand it over to me for my research and I accepted without a moment's hesitation. Whatever it took, I wanted to get this horrible thing out of me, and, as John Oliver said \"you've to to painfully and actively come to grips with history.\"\n\nAnd this was the moment when my mother dropped the A-Bomb of all suppressed memories. She told me about the tape. The tape is an old Compact Cassette, as they were used in the 80ies and 90ies for music and audio-books and whatnot. She told me she had received this monstrous thing during the first summer that she had spent away from my father, so when I was about 3 or 3 and a quarter years old. She described as \"him playing with little Balthasar in the garden breaking his habit of saying mommy\" Already then the pure thought of my father exercising this kind of power over a small boy as to bringing him to unlearn pure and elemental needs frightened me as I've seldom been frightened before. But I asked her for the tape anyways and she promised to hand it over, too.\n\nI also asked her for something I was sure I never would. Years ago my sister, who is 13 years older than me, told me about a document, our mother gave to her when she was 18 years old, so about 23 years ago. Back then she described it to me as a \"letter filled with inappropriate details about our parents' sex-life.\" She also stated that she had asked our mother to promise to never show it neither my brother nor me. A promise which our mother hadn't kept but instead had sent this document to my brother when he was 25 years old, so about 10 years ago (him being 6 years older than me).\n\nSo, I asked my mother for it, because I was curious and thought that maybe it contained information that could help me on my quest to eradicate this horrendous thing lurking inside me. Boy, was I in for a surprise.\n\nMy mother told me that it actually wasn't a letter, but an article or rather a chapter she had written during the time of the divorce for a book on domestic violence and sexualised violence. A chapter that had been refused to be printed by the lady-editors because they were afraid of it being misused by perverted men for arousal's sake because it was so graphic and … honest? Yes, let's go with honest. A criticism she refused by stating that for somebody who never had experienced something like this a graphic description in all of its mind-numbing horror is exactly what's needed. Yet, it never had been published. She told me that the document was also included in the breakup-folder.\n\nAbout two weeks later we met for my and her Ex-Girlfriend's birthday. We spent a fantastic day together, mostly talking about our respective lives, what we had been up to for the past years etc. But on this day my mother also handed me over a bunch of things: cuff links she had inherited from her grandfather and thought I might like them, being the only one of her children who enjoyed fancy clothing every once in a while; the folder of horror, as I came to call it during the past month; old vinyls that I had asked her for, too; the book in which her article should've been published originally; a bunch of books on anti-authoritarian education and descriptions of how to raise children without breaking them mentally; and a perfume she remembered her dad using when she was a child and thought I might like, too.\n\nDuring March I stayed on a friend's couch because my room was sub-rent and I only could go back in April. So my friend was actually present for some of my reading-sessions in this fat folder of horrors. And each page hurt like a knife to the heart. But I kept on going. I wanted to not leave a single page unturned, not a single of my father's fucking lies uncovered.\n\nAnd so my downfall started.\n\nI was – and probably still am – burned-out from the past year of uni. But this particular type of private research threw me right into the unbearable abyss of depression.\n\nFor years, nay, decades, my father had been telling the story of his beloved wife leaving him all of a sudden. He had told my brother and me how \"the feminist\" had decided from one day to the next, to leave him and her children only to pursue \"self-fulfillment.\" It was perpetuated so often it basically became a chorus to his rhetoric. \"The feminist went away for her self-fulfillment.\" \"The feminist said she abhorred you, her children, her sons.\" \"The feminist decided to be lesbian all of a sudden.\" \"I had devoted a quarter of a century to the feminist and then she left me all alone.\" lather, rinse, repeat. For nearly 18 years. Basically for each year these two had lived together, he told my brother and me for another year, how much time he had wasted on her, and how horrible she was, how spiteful and how horrible she was as a wife and caregiver.\n\nAnd even though I knew most of these stories were exaggerations if not outright fabrications, I was not ready for the truth I found in this folder. \n\nMy dad told me once, maybe twice, when I was but a boy, how his hand slipped once and had hit her, because \"the feminist\" had been taking a dig at him for hours, until he couldn't take it anymore. While her description reads as follows: \"I stand under the shower. It feels like the water is running straight through my brains. When I had been hit on my ear for the first time I felt a nasty sting, the second time it felt similar. But the third time I was nauseous and felt like something had ripped apart. I go see the doctor and he tells me how right I was. The eardrum had been ripped into. The first two times it must've healed on its own, the third time it had been damaged to badly that I would need surgery. And more surgeries followed.\"\n\nMy mother described 18 years of intense domestic abuse, physical violence, incidents of de facto rape, suicide-attempts and much much more on these ten pages.\n\nI read it out loudly and as clearly as my clumped throat could handle. My friend Alex was sitting next to me, peacefully painting his Warhammer miniatures. Sometimes, during a little break he would comment, how horrific all of this was. After I had finished, I got up slowly, went to the cabinet, filled myself a glass of maple-wodka and sat on the floor for five minutes. I was just as the beginning of my journey, finding out what this thing was that had been hiding in the darkest shadows of my soul, on my quest to learn how to actually feel again, learn how to cry to not let dark emotions bulge up in my chest for weeks, months, years even. And here I was, learning that I had been raised by a piece-of-shit wife-beater and rapist. Learning it first hand. Feeling horrified, not only for reading all of these monstrous flashbacks my mother had put to paper after she had managed to get away from him; but also feeling even more freaked out by the realisation that I believed all of it. That my knowledge of my father actually told me \"yup, all of this seems legit. He could totally do that.\" And also knowing that he in his mentally deranged narcissistic state would not even by lying when he would say \"no, I never did this.\" He believes all of his fabrications and lies to such an extend, that none of these things ever happened. He was the perfect husband, and the perfect father.\n\nMy mother had left us when I was not even three years old. She went away on January 1st 1992, right the morning after new-years, still carrying that black eye her still-husband had smacked into her when she had told him right before Christmas that she would leave him. She was so afraid he might kill her if she would just take her three children and disappear during a night that she had decided to be up-front and clear about her intentions. In her state of being fully mentally broken and needing recovery, while also thinking that their marriage was perverted, not knowing how mentally sick her then still-husband was, they had decided for now that the children would stay with him.\n\nDuring our phone call she had also described the day she had returned to see if communication between the two was possible. So, in April 1993, one year and three months after she had left, she came back to see her children. But the moment that she was allowed entrance into the house, my then 16 year old sister was ordered by our father to bring my 9 year old brother and me (4 years old) upstairs, while my father wanted to talk to her. \"The purpose of my visit was gone within a minute and there I stood in the kitchen, my husband opposite me holding this massive bread-knife with the red handle in his hand. If I leave this house alive – I told myself – I will file for divorce.\" Thankfully she did make it out alive and filed for divorce, so my parents were divorced in the summer of 1994. And because the legal situation in these days appeared to still be from the 19th century, my father got full custody of us.\n\nAgain thankfully, the situation changed during the next years. In 1995 a custody-reform actually changed the situation quite a bit. Before, just one of the divorcees got full custody automatically and it was basically the judge's job to figure out which one should get 100 per cent of the kids. This judicial reform now stated that a 50-50 custody should be the norm. Also, in 1996 rape in a marriage became illegal. Yes, freaking 1996 made raping one's spouse illegal in my country!\n\nSo my mother went to court yet again in 1996 to get at least some custody of her sons. Her daughter, my older sister, had at this point already become of full age. She had been living outside of this house of horrors for over a year at this point.\n\nBecause in 1995, when my sister was 17 years old and getting ready for her last high-school exams, she had the audacity of having an accident. She was on her way to school and must have not been paying attention, or was distracted, maybe from all the horrors she had endured in her short life so far. However, she was riding along on her bike and crashed into a car. Vehicle damaged, bike damaged, she concussed, that was the outcome. She knew she would possibly need medical attention or at least some time off. Yet, she was so afraid of going home, or just calling our father, so afraid of whatever kind of arbitrary punishment he would come up with for her \"\"\"failure\"\"\" that she called her then-boyfriend instead. He came, picked her up and brought her to his home, where his mother, lets call her Marge, took care of her. My sister told me that she stayed there for a few days and went back only to pick up some things like clothing etc. to be able to stay longer at Marge's place and recover a bit.\n\nWhen she came back to my father's house, he intervened, caught her, and took her key to the house. Eliminating any kind of feeling of trust, or respect, I imagine. Basically through his actions telling her \"you can go, but never come back unless I allow it, or you can leave, and never see your brothers again, unless I say so.\" And so she was kicked out. I still remember all the yelling during the next couple of years whenever she came back to see us. I don't know how often it happened, I would say maybe two or three times a year for the next 5-7 years. She came to see us, but we were sent to our room upstairs immediately. And we had to hear these two yell at each other for maybe an hour or longer. She just wanted to see her two brothers who would've really benefitted from her older voice of reason and tender love, the sister-caregiver who took care of the still-in-shock older brother and the unguided baby-brother who didn't understand why his sister all of a sudden was not allowed to see him. And our father, who did everything he could to keep her from seeing the two boys. We would hear them for so long, yelling, her screams of frustration and pleading. Just for her to be allowed to see us for maybe a minute or two. Run up the stairs, hug us once, and then disappearing again for god knows how long.\n\nShe became of age and wrote her final exams while she was living with Marge and her boyfriend, recovering from a concussion and being intentionally emotionally hurt by her father through separation from the family.\n\nAnd immediately after, my mother filed for a custody lawsuit.\n\nI did read not only through the entirety of the lawyers' correspondence, but also through my mother's letters to her lawyer, her appeal to the court, later some letters she wrote to a feminist magazine that was dealing with issues of women who've had enough of their abusive husbands. My mother wrote detailed accounts of what had happened, the violence, abusive language, total lack of respect for her, her bodily autonomy, the way she had been treated ever since. She explained why she married her then Ex-husband in the first place, only to give her at the time two children at least the façade of a regular family backdrop. She explained why she had avoided it before; she had tried to not become her boyfriend's and then later husband's property.\n\nI also read through the reports the court's children's psychologist had written on my brother (13) and me (7). This psychiatrist wrote a sobering prognosis on the future development of our mental state if our father were to continue our isolation. If he were not stopped from establishing ever more control over the two of us. Despite that, she, the psychologist, advised to leave us at our father's place for the time being, fearing that a relocation would rip us apart mentally, yet, she urged the court to instruct the youth welfare services to control us on a regular basis. In absence of the father! Because she was very aware of how he established psychological control over us, engulfing us in his fight against his ex wife. How he made us his child soldiers in the divorce-war. She was aware at least to some degree, how he was filling our heads with lies.\n\nYet, nobody working for the welfare services ever came to talk to any of us. Or maybe somebody came and thought just talking to our father was enough, ignoring the psychologist's advice. I don't know which one is true. I just know that neither my brother nor I ever talked to anybody sent to help us. Nor did I ever see anybody inspecting my father's house, which, at this point, started turning into a hoarder wet dream of boxes everywhere, slowly but surely filling up every available cubic centimetre.\n\nAnd yet, my mother only gained the right to see me every once in a while. My brother, who is six years older than me, as I mentioned, was already too engulfed by our father's lies. The psychologist's profile of his mental state reads uncomfortable, to be frank. She describes the way he associates himself with our parents' conflict, the way he gets upset when asked if he could imagine even talking to our mother.\n\nI guess I can feel glad. My sibling had a way stronger connection to our mother before she left, so they were hit way harder when she actually went away. They were more susceptible to our father's lies and the way he used them like puppets in his war. On the other hand, a therapist I talked to for a while mentioned that yes, they have these feeling of direct abandonment to face, they feel … betrayed by our mother especially, whom they actually knew. They have two parents who utterly failed them. But at least they do have parents. Defective ones in their point of view, surely, but they were there. Me on the other hand, I had to face not having anybody, really. For years I referred to myself as a three-quarter orphan, because I didn't have a mother. And the father in whose house I was living never really cared much about me. Where my siblings had defective parents who gave them at least a minimum of anchorage, I didn't have anybody, I was afloat, a drifter from the very beginning.\n\nAnd this is what I thought of myself until this fateful phone call with my newly accepted mother. This is what I thought until listening to this tape…\n\nIt has been with me now for 6 weeks. But after reading through so many files in this folder, I couldn't muster the energy to listen to this tape. I knew more or less what I would have to face, I thought. But I also knew I couldn't stomach it. Two weeks ago, two friends came over to see how I was doing and to see if I would like to paint miniatures together to get some distraction. I jumped at the opportunity of having two friends with me who had known about my odyssey of horros from its very beginning. We listened to the tape together, and they were as befuddled as me. Most of what was happening was that my father was reading a comic with me. I called Scrooge McDuck, who in Germany is called Dagobert Duck, constantly DagoDuck, because I was still learning how to speak. We chuckled whenever we heard things like this. But some things didn't really make sense. Or … they did make sense, in a perverted kind of way. We noticed that my sister was referred to multiple times. She was doing chores in the house. The way my father talked about her, it seemed more like she was a servant in the house, the replacement-mother, now that the real mother was gone. Which matched what my sister had told me. That she was taking care of the house, the laundry, the dishes, our clothes, ironing, vacuuming etc. A servant, that is exactly what my father made of her. While at the same time he was committing a heinous crime on his youngest son.\n\nWhenever I was uttering the word \"mom\" or \"mommy\" he would reply with a \"growl\" (\"knurr\" in German). It seemed playful. But that's only the way a narcissist disguises his cruelty. He used the word \"Knurr\" to indicate to me that this word \"mommy\" was not to be spoken in his house ever again. And when I wouldn't stop using the word, he would threaten me with \"dusting off your pants\" meaning spank the three year old. The tape finishes with me using the now illegal word again and him doing his shtick, trying to make me stop using this word. And when I wouldn't budge, he clearly grabs me and ….\n\nthe tape stops the same moment a slap is audible.\n\n…\n\nA friend of mine told me recently that we've all been programmed to some extent. I agree. Yet, what my father did to me, purge fundamental and absolutely natural needs and wants from me during my infancy … It is a thought that had been haunting me ever since. It is not the normal kind of programming – if I might use this word for lack of a better term. It is proof for me that my father punished me horrifically for wanting my mother back, for wanting an emotional connection back that I had been cut off from. And any divorce is hard enough on everybody involved, especially the children. But if the parents can still talk for their children's sake, I guess most issues can be resolved, and the trauma can be limited. But in my case, I learned, the trauma was actually enforced.\n\nI've known for quite a while, that my father's mental state has been degrading to quite some degree. And that in his paranoia and narcissistic derangement he had been hurting a lot of people. But things like these that I wanted to actually know, showed me, that he is not only a victim of violent abuse turned perpetrator. But that even in his moments of sanity, he cared to little about his own children's mental well-being and way more about his own convenience, that he turned on us in such a way. That he willingly sacrificed so much of our souls, of all three of us. I am still abhorred by this.\n\nI am still shocked when thinking about these violent experiences in my early childhood could have influenced me subconsciously during my relationships. That things like this were in the back of my head, making me behave erratically, developing panic, anger, verbal violence, and throwing me into fits of pure horror whenever I wanted to open myself emotionally, but felt flooded by the pure awe of accepting emotional closeness and love. How I became a living and breathing paradox in the face of what I yearned for, but feared so much. And I think I found the fundamental explanation of this fear. And I could not fathom how a father would chose his own convenience before his children's power to feel one of the most important yet basic emotions and be happy with it. A friend had to help me accept the conclusion that he is not only a sick man. But also a bad man.",
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      "title": "Just a depressive thought - I",
      "body": "So yes, I remember vividly the way I was treated in school for years. Funny thing is, I thought about writing this entry because I remembered how a guy from a parallel class back then asked me, why I, back then already nearly 6 feet tall and pretty heavy, semi-muscular, never fought back.\n\nAnd of course, the moment I decided to write this entry, some people started working in the hall where I'm sitting, drilling holes in the wall, fucking up my concentration. I rushed out of the house this morning, because, the day I decided to sleep in because today is the only day I do not have any appointments in the morning, of course today's the day the neighbours are doing repairs in their apartment, taking the drilling machine to the walls. Murphy's law I presume. In their defense, they did put an announcement up, warning they'd do such a thing and even apologized for the inconvenience. I hope their apartment will look nice afterwards. It still annoys me that the two places where I wanted to work today are being refurbished like this. Right now I'm sitting in one of the major halls of the university, trying to get away from the neighbours' work, and – as I said – the moment I start typing, the guys put their own drilling machines to work. Fuck this!\n\nSo, what I wanted to talk about is the way I was my class's scapegoat for about four years. In Germany we have parallel classes. So when you're entering the Gymnasium in fifth grade, you're being separated in a number of classes, depending on the state, city, and school you attend. The school that I went to had four parallel classes per year. So 5a, 5b, 5c, 5d and then above them the 6a, 6b, 6c, 6d etc. This went on like this until the 10th year. My dad had decided that I needed to learn Latin first. My sister, who is the oldest of us three, had to and I don't think she was particularly happy with it. That's why my brother had begged the old man to start with English, which he was allowed to. Now in this particular school, the \"a\"-class was always the one starting with Latin, while the other three started with English. My sister therefore had started in the 5a just as I did years later. My brother was put in the \"d\"-class. So when I finished elementary school and it was high time to sign up for Gymnasium, my dad decided that putting my brother in an English-first class apparently had not turned out in a way that he would've called \"successful\", so I was being put in a Latin-first class. I argued against it, I didn't want it, I didn't care for Latin; but he did not agree. He signed me up for Latin anyways.\n\nWhen I went to the Gymnasium, I was about 10 years old. At that point my parents had been separated for nearly 8 years. My father had successfully eradicated most of my connections with my mother. And he himself had given into all of his obsessions. Books, old books, even older books, crap to hoard etc. The house had started to slowly transform into a collection of mostly useable but never actually used objects. The makeshift solutions turned it into a wartime U-Boat that hadn't been to an allied harbour in years. The sink was not really fixed but worked. The broken soap dish in the bathtub had never been grinded down so I wore a nice scar from it on my finger. The garage was slowly running over with Christian miniatures and scenes, which is a big thing in the holiday season. The stairways filled with books, boxes filled with books, and boxes yet to be filled with books. But it was still … mostly normal, or mostly tolerable let's say.\n\nWhat definitely wasn't tolerable was the way that this influenced things like personal hygiene. The washing machine didn't run as often anymore because my father was occupied with … things. Acquiring stock for his fixed idea jobs saving knowledge of the Bohemian culture (and I mean geographically Bohemian, not boheme) and things like this. He cared less and less for his children, who at that point where only my brother and me, because my sister had been kicked out of the house years ago. She had dared to speak up. She got kicked out even before her 18th birthday and had to live in a friend's house for a while, even while preparing her final high school exams. Before, when she had still lived with us, she was actually the caregiver, washing clothes and making sure her two baby brothers actually had things to wear. When she was kicked out I was not even 5 years old, my brother must have been barely 11. I remember how my father started demonizing her the same way he had demonized our mother.\n\nSo, both caregivers, mother and sister had either scared off or actively kicked out and we, my brother and me, were basically not allowed to utter their names and state that they existed, let alone wish for them to come back or only see them for a day. Whenever my sister came over to see us, we were being sent upstairs, not allowed to see her for more than five minutes, but constantly heard the yelling from downstairs. And this was my environment back home. At this point for over five years. \n\nWell, I was being sent to school. We didn't have the money to afford a bike for me, my dad was busy working at home on … something (it's been nearly twenty fucking years and I still don't understand what he worked on or is working on currently), so he couldn't drive me to school, and we didn't have the money to buy monthly tickets for the bus for me. So I had to walk to school. Which became sort of a tradition for me. I went to this high school for ten years. And I had to walk there at least once a day (in later years sometimes twice). Once there in the morning, once back home in the afternoon. Which took about half an hour each. All in all, I walked about 2.000 hours in these ten years.\n\nI met my new class whom I was supposed to study with until the 10th year of school (so the next six years). They seemed decent enough at first. I remember a tiny guy called Johannes whom I sat next to in the first session. We were sitting in the first row together and had a nice conversation. Oddly enough he became one of my most fearsome tormenters for quite a while, but appeared to be a nice guy to everybody who was not me, and even to me when he was not with the rest of the group. Within the first session we were separated. I, being a tall guy, was put in the last row, while he was allowed to stay where he was.\n\nOver the next couple of weeks and months a pattern would emerge that would not really change for the next four years. I, coming from a poor family, was wearing stupid clothes. I, coming from a household that didn't care, was wearing smelly clothes. I think our washing machine ran maybe once or twice a month at this point. And it would become way worse. Pretty fast, the class developed the simultaneously lazy and incredibly uninspired yet horribly painful name stinky (or \"Stinkie\" in the original German) for me, which was basically the only way anybody in this class addressed me for the next four years.\n\nThis class, as a group, didn't want to have anything to do with me. Sitting next to me was punishment. Having to have to talk to me was punishment. Even the guys who had to call me if a course was cancelled saw themselves as being punished. They hated me. And they made no effort to hide this fact. It was a group of kids who led the others in this hatred, obviously. Lukas, Magnus, and Johannes were the worst. They were the kids who actively encouraged the others to torment me. Johannes was the most sneaky of these kids. He was small, so he could play the victim card easily when I acted out, tried to defend myself. Most of the other kids in the class were following their advice. There were 22 kids, four of them girls, one being me. There were two kids who mostly tolerated me or even saw me as a friend for some time. Andre and Edouard.\n\nEdouard was the son of Ukrainian migrant. Andre was a soft and good-hearted kid from the other side of town, coming from something that we could see as a \"suburb\" (even though this term is not really applicable to German cities). With these I could actually talk to. Unfortunately for me, Edouard became \"cool\" after we started with the 7th grade, so he distanced himself ever so slightly from me. But at this time the torment also became kind of old for the others. So I was not as much despised and more disdained at that time.\n\nTo this day I don't know how much the teachers actually knew of this. I remember our German teacher who once told me after class that I was old enough to actually take a shower every once in a while. Well, I guess he was right. But that didn't really matter, seeing that there were no clean clothes available for weeks sometimes. After I started talking about all of these things during the last three months, things I've kept secret for most of my life now, a few friends asked me why nobody called social services to check the house where I grew up. Which is a good question. Also a question I can't find any answer to. I don't recall ever having somebody from the social services at our house to investigate. I just think that nobody really cared. Group mentality I guess: Either you don't care, it's not your cup of tea (or \"glass of beer\", because that's the German approach), or you follow the herd when they decide to fuck somebody up for good.\n\nI do recall that most teachers really followed that thought. Nobody cared, nobody asked a question. None of them asked me to stay after class and checked up on me. And at that point, when I was around 12 years old, I must have been running around in shabby, used-up, dirty, raggedy clothes and was seriously stinking up the place.\n\nHowever, I do recall one teacher. He didn't care about my living situation. But he did care about me. As in, he cared to fuck me up himself. He was our Latin teacher for two years (5th and 6th grade) and he shamelessly pinpointed me for homework-squeezing, the great technique of asking one student all the questions in front of the whole class. This technique is debasing, belittling, mocking and traumatizing, especially to bad pupils. And it was his favourite when dealing with me. I was a bad pupil. I was seldomly prepared for school. I started escaping the nightmare of my life by numbing myself with audio-books and videogames because I was not allowed to use the TV at home. And Latin class I had started with a 3 (with German marks in school ranging from 1 to 6, 1 being the best and 6 being the worst, a 4 being the minimum you need to actually pass a class), and slowly falling to a 6 within my four years as member of this class.\n\nSo yes, I spent four years in this class. Personal hygiene at home fell because I was totally neglected by my father. My interest in school fell rapidly. I started hating going there so much I tried to come up with excuses to not go there every single day. I developed issues falling asleep. I lacked sleep so much at one point, that whenever I was woken up in the morning I was screaming from pain in my calves. They cramped up so often because of how much sleep I didn't get over the course of these years. I started eating compulsively because of the deep hole I fell into, knowing that I would only get mocked for 6 hours the moment that I laid foot on school-grounds. I feel from being an okay pupil to actually not being fit for transfer to the next grade within barely a year. For the remainder of my time in this class I was \"versetzungsgefährdet\" (which means I was an at-risk student, only a slight decline of my marks would've let to me having to repeat the entire year). And I stayed like this for the next three years when my grades in English and Latin fell just a notch. My reexamination in English was graded a 6 (an F), so I had to change to another class. While the rest of my class moved on to become the 9a, I had to go back an entire year and join the new 8a.\n\nEven though I saw this as rock-bottom at the time and thought seriously about jumping off a building for the first time, it turned out that changing to another class actually made things way better for me. I was 14 at the time. I had been thinking about self-harm occasionally but never seriously. I vented my anger and frustration through other means. I started eating compulsively as I said. And because my father is an over-controlling narcissist, I was not allowed to eat whatever was in the sweets-section of our supply cabinet in the house. So I started to take things from it without being allowed to. This lead to me being punished on multiple occasions. When I was younger I was given a hiding a number of times, but when I became older and bigger, this faded out as an option for my father. I was rebellious, and growing so big that I could actually defend myself from this type of corporal punishment. So I was grounded a few times instead. But the big punishment was the removal of trust, if I may say so. While my sister had to hand in her key to the house when she started acting up as a 17 year old, I was not trusted with supply cabinet privileges anymore, when I was 13 years old. The cabinet was locked. And my father told me that he never had to lock it before in his entire life and that I was responsible for this.\n\nSo I started stealing the key whenever he wasn't around. The key to the cabinet was on his keychain, which usually was lying around on his desk. Often times I took it and then removed a few items from the cabinet to eat later. Those I usually had hidden in my bed or close to it. My father still noticed it and gave me a handful for it. Which lead me to not doing this anymore. Instead, I stole Nutella from the cellar.\n\nAs I said, the old man was and is a massive hoarder. So whenever he went out to buy something, he didn't buy one or two glasses of nutella, or two or three cans of beans, he bought the palette (but only when it was for sale). That's why we usually had a few palettes in the cellar. Two palettes for kidney beans, three palettes of peas, two palettes of Nutella etc. And we went to the cellar on a weekly basis to get stuff up to the kitchen. So nobody would notice a glass of Nutella missing.\n\nI went to the cellar for weeks, if not months, on a daily basis with a spoon in my hand and quenched my lust for sweets and happiness by shoving this gooey, black and oily mass by the spoonload in my mouth. When I turned 14, I was about 6'3'' and weighed around 270 pounds (1,90 m bei ca. 120 Kilo Gewicht). \n\nTo be frank, I don't really know how to finish this entry. I guess that's the downside of going with the flow. I guess there is more coming another time.",
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      "title": "",
      "body": "Hannibal - eat me or I will eat you. :D",
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      "permlink": "hannibal-eat-me-or-i-m-gonna-eat-myself-part-ii",
      "title": "Hannibal – Eat me or I'm gonna eat myself – Part II",
      "body": "Anyhow, I don't recall if it was a CBS (or are they called CVS. That's what the internet does to you. It makes you lose these details because \"I can just google it\"). Doesn't matter. We shuffle into the place, look around like two dumbasses. There is maybe one customer in this huge pharmacy, because of course a pharmacy is as big as a Pharaoh's grave in the US. Why just buy one aspirin if you can buy aspirin for the next five years for your spouse, kids, grandparents, uncle Billy who has been lying in his grave for the past ten years and then pop all these pills next week because \"my tummy hurts\". So maybe one and a half customer and three people working the store. But two of them appear to be not interested in anything that’s happening. I assume the old guy with the grey remains amongst his male pattern baldness was the shift leader, so he fled us right away. There was probably urgent toner refill in the office needed or maybe his wife called. I don't care. Because him and the other lady there, they left us to the new guy. John, sweet kid, maybe 17, still had some acne going on, curly hair and big glasses. His nametag stated that he had been working there ever since 2017. So he looked at us, asked how he could help us and we asked for a printer. A regular freaking printer. Or maybe even a fax-machine-combi-über-device. Doesn't matter, just something to print with. He looks at us like we had just asked for him to call the pope for us and then states that they don't have anything like that. They only print photos. The photographer in me rolls his eyes. If you have a photo that you want to keep, don't fucking print it. Get it developed. Costs twice as much, but in a hundred years your descendants will still be able to take a look at it, while with a print you're lucky if you can still identify whatever is on it next weekend.\n\nAnyhow. So the kid tells us that they can print photos and that's it. We glance at each other and I decide to just roll with it. We both know that this is probably the closest we will come to a printer in 2018 without buying one. And then we tell him, that I need a pdf printed. He shakes his head \"no pdfs, sir. But you can take a screenshot and print this\" The paranoid crazy person inside of me starts dancing and cursing at the same time. Dancing because I actually went with two safeties here. I put the pdf on both my SD card AND my USB stick because I figured, that one of the two devices would fail me on a printer. But I had also brought my tablet thinking \"it couldn't hurt to have another backup.\" So I flip it open, get the pdfs, take screenshots of the tickets and then we hook it to the photo-printer. Doesn't work. John looks at the thing, opens my tablets menu, looks confused, has probably never seen written German. Gives me a confused glance. I check it out myself. Nope, it doesn't connect. So John gets another cable. And pling goes the tablet while the photo-printer starts reading all my photos. I smile at John. This might take a while. My host asks how many photos I've got on the thing. I tell him that I have been travelling for a while and haven't had the time to clean up the device in a while. So while I wonder if the NSA has already cracked the printer and is copying all of my photos, videos, audio and checks out what types of podcast I like, John takes care of another customer who wants to check out. Because of course his boss is still talking to his lover on the phone while writing with his wife on whatsapp, or doing some other ridiculous crap.\n\nAfter about one year waiting for the indexing process to finish taking a good look at every photo anybody has ever sent to me, we finally reach the menu where John can check out the two screenshots, types in coupon code, so I can shave off one dollar for each print.\nOh great, the train I'm sitting on right now is standing still. In the middle of a town, in the middle of an intersection. Sucks to be a cardriver in this town today, haha!\nSo, John shaves off a dollar of each print so that I can actually have the tickets in a readable size without paying a minor fortune for a print that I will need for exactly the five seconds it's gonna take the bus driver to read my destination and the date of departure. My host looks at me. \"Is it gonna work with photo paper? Are they gonna accept this?\" I smirk back. \"They said printed, but never clarified on what kind of paper and in which size.\" For a moment I ponder whether or not to print my next busses on a piece of paper you would hide in your palm for an exam and then drop the idea. Not really in the mood for more stupidities for the next couple of hours. \nThe receipt tells us that we have to wait for about a half hour to get the prints, but John takes care of it right away, laughing out: \"This is the craziest thing I've had happen all week.\" My host looks at him bewildered \"All week? So what's happening here the rest of the year?\" John just smiles back. Do we really want to know what sort of crazy stuff is happening in a pharmacy? I remember a scene from GoodFellas, where a young café-clerk is soaking up blood of a guy who had been shot with a kitchen towel. Well, he hadn't been shot with the towel. They .. uh fuck it. You know what I want to say.\n\nOkay, and the train starts to move again. John hands me the prints. I glance at them. I shrug. They're okay photo prints, with a bus ticket on each of them. John puts them on the counter, leaves to get rid of another customer. I mean, to make him pay. That's all coming of the wrong way. So while John is looking after this customer I take another good look at the prints, there's something wrong there. The ticket I'm looking at says \"departing from Hannibal to St. Louis.\" Did I screw up? Did I put the cities' names in the form the wrong way round? Can't be. I made sure of it. Twice. What had happened. I look at the other print. \"Departing from St. Louis to Hannibal.\" Okay, so what about Chicago? I start investigating. Why do I have a round trip booked instead of going to Hannibal and then to Chicago. What had happened? I open the tablet. Oh, great. The second ticket has a second page attached to it. And yes, the second part of the ticket is for a bus leaving towards Chicago from St. Louis. Nice of their page to not tell me about transfers beforehand. Only after I bought the ticket.\nI tell John. We take another screenshot, attach the tablet again. By now the NSA knows the last detail of my life and has seen the abyss therein. The NSA is now crawled up against a wall, wallowing in sorrow and crying for the things it has seen there.\nWe're waiting so long for the tablet to finish indexing all my photos yet again another fifteen species have finally died out, print the last page, pay and leave the laughing John behind. I curse the day printers were invented.\nFinally, we return home telling my hosts wife what our odyssey has lead to. She laughs at the sheer weirdness of the whole thing. Kids, if you ever find yourself at a point where you need to leave the house on a Sunday evening to find a printer to print a bus ticket for the next morning, just reschedule your trip!\nMonday, February 19th arrives. We both have to get up at inhumane o'clock for me to get to the bus stop in time, and for him to go to work after bringing me there. I roll out of bed after sleeping way too little in a way too comfortable bed to leave it so early in the morning. I've been in there for only five hours, maybe less. I haven't had a single night of more than 5 hours in the past two or three weeks. That's what being broken up with, being broken-hearted and finding out you’re a depressive psycho-monster that eats up love for breakfast and belches out unwanted refusal for lunch while pissing regret for dinner, does to you, I guess.\n\nThe two of us, and I mean my host and me, not my regret and me, we take off in his car. Twenty, maybe thirty minute drive towards the airport. He lets me out at the pick-up/drop-off parking lot at terminal 1 of the Lambert airport in St. Louis. I look around, try to find the spot that these guys described on their website. So over there, under there, hop into the air to find an invisible box, collect the coins, then climb the ladder and you'll find the bus depot. They did have a map on their website, but of course they did not tell their intern to take two minutes out of his busy coffee-making schedule to draw a big red X unto the map to show people where they actually have to go.\nI shuffle over to a security guy I see and ask him for the bus stop. He looks confused. Coaches? Long-distance buses? English, motherfucker, do you speak it? Suddenly the coin drops, he smiles a big smile, then points with his right hand, tells me to go past the shuttles, into the parking garage. What, a coach fits in there? Is it a coach operated by the Gimli Moria coach company? Nope, pass through the garage, through a tunnel, kill the Balrog and then go to the other castle to free the princess. I bobble my head, agreed. I cast a spell and head past the shuttles into the garage. Nope, no tunnel, no Balrog. Only five dwarfes talk to each other. I ask them for the bus-depot, coaches, anything. English, motherfuckers, do y'all speak it? They raise their hands. Five hands pointing into seventeen different directions to go to. Finally a lady-dwarf speaks up. \"Summon a spell of dispell confusion\" she says. \"And then just go to your right, there's the tunnel there.\" I bobble my head again.\n\nI follow the path the lady-dwarf showed me and end up in paradise. A room, about three by six metres (go google how much that is in feet or just let me tell you… it's not that big). Half of the room is taken up by a lady, probably a very very kind-hearted and sweet lady, but she looks like Jabba the Hutt's older sister after having eaten nothing but cheesecake the entire weekend. Next to her but three seats away is a guy with a worn-out military duffle bag. Another bloke with a snapback is sitting on the other side staring at his phone as if he was waiting for Big Brother to command him to pick up a rifle. Outside, where the rain is starting up again, there's a guy who used to be younger, apparently waiting for a bus. I look around. There is nothing in this room, indicating what kind of buses are leaving from this stop. Not in the front of the room, not in the back. I dispel any kind of enchantment that could hide such information, still nothing. Common sense, motherfuckers, do you speak it? Why would you not give this information? Why would you not tell foreigners where to find the right kind of transportation? What? Do you have anything against foreigners? … Ooooh, right. I am so sorry!\nSo I pass the gravitational field of Jabbarina, I want to yell at her Scooby's immortal words: \"it's not fat-shaming. You're just dying!\", but I decide not to. The gravitational pull would just absorb the acoustic waves, energy lost, nothing gained. I get out through the door. I look at the signs attached to the bus-stop. Metro-busses, four or five different lines are listed, but no information on anything going out of town. No Greyhound, no Megabus, no nothing. The Martians hear my eyes rolling again. I turn to the middle-aged guy and ask him if he's waiting for a coach. If he knows anything about them. He replies with kind words. Nope, he's waiting for the shuttle bringing him to Terminal 1. I cannot blaim him for not wanting to fight the Balrog in the tunnel, so I shrug. The shuttle arrives. A tiny black lady is steering it, even though she needs x-ray vision to actually see the street from where she's sitting. I ask her if she knows where the coaches are departing. She says \"yes, Greyhound is leaving right from where you're standing.\" She is just being direct, doesn't care about me, but doesn't particularly hate me either. I ask for Burlington. She says \"Oh I don't know where you want to go. But Greyhound is departing from right there.\" The door closes in my face. I look confused. I thought Burlington was the name of the bus company. I check the ticket. Yup, Burlington Trailways. By the way: Fuck Burlington Trailways. But more on that later.\nI check the time. About ten minutes left, give or take. Istill don't know if I'm at the right spot for the Burlington bus, so I decide to go back in. Nobody official around here. It's basically a parking lot with a tiny little edge for people to throw their stuff in the shuttle and then drive off again. I see Jabberina's moons tumbling towards a cataclysmic collision. The poor civilisations there wondering which deity they pissed off to deserve such a cruel fate. I look at the military guy and Mr Snapback. They don't care. We're in Don't talk to me country. A couple of minutes pass by before the next shuttle stops. I leave the room again and ask the nice young black lady if she knows where the busses, the coaches are departing. She looks at me. \"Yeah sure, at Terminal 1. Which company are you traveling with.\" – \"Burlington\" I reply. She tells me to jump in, she'll bring me there. We depart from the shuttle-stop, right onto the highway. She's staring at the street. \"What was the name of the company again?\"  - \"Burlington Trailways.\" I reply again. She shrieks. \"Oh no, they're departing from where you were honey.\"\nI look at her in shock, look at the watch. Three minutes until departure. Yup, that's happening. \"I'll drop these two gentlemen off and then bring you right back.\" She says apologetically. If I were smarter maybe I could think of something smart to do, say … But I just nod along. She breaks the sound barrier in her tiny shuttle, stops right before slamming through the terminal gate and then wishes the two guys on the shuttle a nice flight. I wonder why they're flying again so soon after doing the kessel run in less than 1.2 miles. The young lady definitely feels the need for speed and rushes back to where we started. I see the little room from afar. It's empty. Everybody has gone. She glances at me, as if to say \"sorry, that was a big big oops on my side.\" I only mention that the cataclysmic collision has destroyed the mighty planet of Jabberina. Or maybe she just hopped on a bus and left. The shuttle-driver laughs. Yes, the round lady is there every day and takes the city bus. No reason to be worried. The brings the shuttle to a screeching halt. I jump out. Yes, everybody is gone. Yes, I'm alone there. Yes, the flipping bus has passed by there in the maybe 4 minutes we've been gones, swallowed the two other guys and is now inbound for Hannibal. I look around. The driver comes out of her shuttle, comes over to me. \"I called my supervisor. He said no coach came through here.\" If I were smarter I knew what to say or do. But I just nod. She's giving me the apologising look again. Sorry.\nI sit down outside, under the roof, breathing fresh rainy air with a hint of exhaust pipe and jet-engine. There is nobody around for miles. Well, except the people passing by in their cars. But nobody running around there. Nobody sitting. Jabberina has left the solar system and has kept every living soul in her asteroid belt and dragged them wherever she went. I am the only one left on planet bus-stop. I yell at the storm. I wish for a lightning rod to climb up at and curse at the gods. Zeus and Thor got nothing on my lightning strikes. I yell louder, scream, shout, let it all out. Yes, exactly that's the reason why you have signs to indicate to non-locals where the crap is that they need. After a few minutes I've cooled off. I start thinking about what to do with this day. I'm sitting at an airport and I've got about 10 hours to kill. Is there a shuttle going towards downtown, or do I have to spend about 5 billion spacebucks on a cab? I get my travelling diary out. Time to actually play some catch-up. I can't write on a bus so that's the time to actually get some information dumped into my notebook. And in just this moment I see a red coach coming closer on the other side of the highway. All of a sudden a shuttle is standing in front of me. The door swings open and in there is my black lady smiling at me. \"There's the bus coming. That was weighing down my heart so much!\" If I were smarter I would've said or done something smarter. But I just nodded and said thank you.\n\nThe shuttle takes off again, heading straight for the moon. My bus comes in, stops. A small and roundish figure in uniform bounced down the stairs. The eyes gloom above the thin moustache. I hand him my photo-ticket, wait for him to say something on the matter. \"Going north?\" he asks? \"Hannibal, I reply.\" – \"Alright,\" he answers. I enter the coach. Two guys in the back, a bigger guy right behind the driver to the right, over-ear headphones, eyes half-closed in the bus-induced half-sleep I know so well. A golden retriever saliva-ing up the place next to him. I take a seat a couple of rows behind the snoozing bloke, check the wifi. We're underway and I call Burlington Trailways via skype to reschedule my bus for the evening.\nI wanted to go to Hannibal with all my belongings and then continue towards Chicago. But when I found out that the bus leaving from Hannibal was going back to St. Louis, combined with the thought that there probably won't be any place to leave the backpack for my day in Hannibal, my host and me agreed to me staying another night, leaving from St. Louis the next day. Which lead to me sitting on an Amtrak towards Chicago right now, writing all this for y'all.\nSo on the bus I called Burlington to reschedule the departure from St. Louis to Chicago for the next day. I reach a guy. He is not being an ass in the most strict definition of the term. But he definitely is not winning any competition in being friendly customer service either. I tell him my plight. He answers with a question. \"Where'd you buy the ticket.\" – \"online\" – \"so whatcha need to doo is to go to the bus station in St. Louis and get a new one there. Because the line is being operated by Greyhound.\" – \"okay, so I can't do it with you nor online?\" – \"No, you need to go to the bus station and pay a 20 dollar fine.\" – \"20 dollars\"?\" – \"Yes\" – \"Okay, well thank you.\" – \"Click\"\nI guess he didn’t' even wait for me to finish the conversation. So I would've understood 5 bucks for a ticket of this price category, but twenty bucks. And this joke of a customer service? Fuck Burlington! And while we're at it, fuck Greyhound, too. Hard and often! But more on that another time!\nSo at this point I decided to take Amtrak. Costs pretty much the same as rescheduling, but their departure times were way better for my schedule, and I've got legroom. Freaking legroom! Btw: Who the fuck came up with classes based on economic value on trains, busses, planes? Shouldn't the classes be connected to the amount of legroom a person needs? Wouldn't it be fairer to have somebody that is taller than the average sit in a seat where he could maybe still feel his legs after twenty minutes? Or maybe even move them at least a tiny bit? No? Okay… Too communist I guess.\nSo after two hours in this rather okay coach we stop at a gas station in a place whose name I've already forgotten. About half an hour out of Hannibal. I buy a coffee there to not fall asleep while standing. I yearn for some Argentinean mate. The coffee tastes like somebody forgot to change the filter in the machine and then brew another batch without ever realising. I get back on the bus. I pump loud music in my ears to not think about things I'd rather not think about. Background noise to space out, coffee to not fall asleep. Paradox world.\nThe bus rumbles on again. Takes about half an hour for the remaining 5 or 6 miles. Why does your transportation always take so goddamn long?\nWe ride into town. The rain is about to stop at least. I see the soles of my boots peeling off. Great! Not even half a year old and already falling to pieces. Where is my super-glue when I need it. I hop out of the bus. We're in a parking lot of an Ardee's, Harbee's, Artwo's or something of the likes. I get my camera out. The lense is still fucked. I ripped the lens shade off when the damn thing entangled itself somewhere in a museum in St. Louis. Ripped the plastic front right off of the lense. When I glued it back in place some oils must have leaked out of the open parts onto the frontal glass. Now there is two or three spots on the lense that I can't clean up again. I hope some hard alcohol is going to fix the problem, either by rubbing it off, or getting me drunk to a point where I don't give a shit about it anymore.\nI've got \"Late Goodbye\" by \"The Poets of the Fall\" running while a sweet couple is sitting in front of me, she sleeping on his shoulder while he looking out of the windows with a wonderful serenity.\nSo back in Hannibal, I strap on my big swinging camera and march towards town, because of course the non bus-depot is not situated within anything even remotely interested in this tiny nothing of a town. So I walk for around two or three kilometres into town (let's make that 1,5 or 2 miles). And here's the point where we pick back up from where we left off about two hours, some ticket-shenanigan, and a huge coffee ago.\nSo: Tiny, fucked-up houses, churches and a long street called \"Broadway\" I laugh at the irony. On my way to Hannibal we passed by a few huts in the middle of nowhere, where a street was called \"Wall-Street\" but I didn't see anybody in suits. I follow Broadway and take in the grandiose vistas the city has to offer. More churches, a dry fountain, and … yep, that about covers it. I pass by the three blocks that represent the historic part of the city, see the Mark Twain Hotel from a few blocks away, walk towards the waterfront. There is a railtrack I need to cross. Just about two metres to its side is a playground for little children. Isn't that nice? I hope there is not too many trains passing by here, because otherwise the kids while definitely have some hearing impairment later on. I walk around the little park there, record my little audio just to have any sort of record of my first thoughts of the place.\n\nThen I continue towards the Mark Twain Museum. The ticket is valid for the museum, and the historic complex, which consists of Mark Twain's birth house, the Becky Thatcher house, the Huckleberry Finn hut, and adjacent buildings. So I start walking through the first floor of the museum. To the left is an exhibition of \"A yankee at Camelot\", to the right another one on \"Tom Sawyer and Huckleberry Finn.\" I pass by the introductory signs on Tom Sawyer and Huckleberry Finn. Short summaries of what these books are about. Nothing about them being children's stories, finally! I pass through a paper-maché cave. A motion detector shines a bright light on a rubber bat in an alcove, begging me to be startled. There is a sign underneath it. Yes, this was a state of the art special effect back in the 1930ies. I make a mental note. \"Check out 1930ies Tom Sawyer adaptation.\" I turn around a corner in the cave (I can't put enough quotation marks around the word cave, so I won't even try) and another motion detector makes Indiun Joe appear behind a glass wall. [Insert great and fitting quote from Tow Sawyer here]",
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      "parent_permlink": "travel",
      "author": "balthorsar",
      "permlink": "hannibal-eat-me-or-i-m-gonna-eat-myself-part-i",
      "title": "Hannibal – Eat me or I'm gonna eat myself – Part I",
      "body": "So I am sitting on an Amtrak right now, St. Louis to Chicago. It's 9:30 in the morning, I feel like 3:20 and it looks like it's Los Angeles 2019 outside. I've been feeling somewhat crappy for the past couple of days even though I spent some amazing days in St. Louis. You know how it is after a break-up. Your spouse throws your crap out of the windows while you're gone, so you return to the apartment with your life being only a fraction of all the crap you see lying on the streets. But after a month or so you think you're cool, so you send her/him/gorgonzola a little message that such and such reminded you of them and how much you love and miss them only to not only find the rest of your vinyl collection on the street but also your facebook friendship. Because of course she still loves you. But … she doesn’t want to speak to you, doesn’t want to see your stupid depressive face, doesn’t want to hear from you or even be reminded that you're still breathing. Maybe when the robot uprising is happening she'll be replaced by a robot and you can explain to this robot that a depression does not fucking mean that you just feel \"a bit sad and without energy every once in a while\", but that it can seriously fuck up your brain chemistry and makes you go all haywire. Yessir! Okay, so I think I digress, or however the hedge this is spelled.\n\nThe reason why I got my huge monstrosity of a laptop out of my backpack was so I could write y'all what happened to me yesterday. And I just noticed that I write y'all all the time even though I'm not southern. So, I spent a while in the south, Texas, Tennessee, Louisiana. And I met some really great folks there, decent people to have fantastic conversation about whatever with. So I guess I just adapted it, cause it sounds funny and it makes a lot of sense to be able to distinguish between you as in \"you, one person\" and you as in \"hey everybody\" without having to say \"everybody\" every gorram time. \n\nOkay, second time I got sidetracked, but that's alright. I'm still on the first page. So, back to topic, yesterday, February 20th 2018 – and I just noticed this might take a while before it gets uploaded because I've had issues setting up the profile aaaaaand Amtrak doesn't have a wifi, because of course it doesn’t'. Looks like the rainy post-apocalypse out there, but we're still living in the digital middle ages. Whatever. So I went to Hannibal yesterday. No, I did not want to eat my brain even though I really feel like doing this right now. I went to Hannibal, Missouri. Bet you didn’t' see this one coming. Any idea why? Well, I was recording some audio-memos to myself why there, so I try to recapture what I said there. I mentioned that Hannibal, Missouri was a tiny piece of crap town in the middle of nowhere. Which I stand by. I am sorry, if you are from Hannibal, please don't take this as an insult. I said the same about Rio de Janeiro – and I stand by that, too. That every once in a while I come into a town and my first thought is \"yikes\" doesn't mean I wouldn't like you. It just means that this particular town is butt-ugly, there is nothing to do or whatever. And if you are from Hannibal, Missouri, you know that there is fucking nothing to do there, right? Right!\n\nExcept one thing. There is a man called Samuel Longhorn Clemens who spent most of his childhood and youth there. Nobody knows who Sam Clemens is, because everybody knows him by his nome du plum. Tom Sawyer. No, just kidding: Mark Twain. He grew up in this tiny, backwards and frankly ugly town at the Mississippi (how many pees are there in Mississippi again?). And one of the first things after hopping out of the coach there was, that there was one long street connecting the bus depot, haha, no, Hannibal doesn't have a bus depot, connecting the Arbee's parking lot where the coach stopped, to the actual city. And this street was framed by one story houses, some with confederate flags, because, \"hey, I am a good and responsible slave-owner! I keep my slave locked in a safe!\" And also a lot of churches. I think there were more churches than anything else in this city. No wonder aunt Polly was such a religious zealot. And the most bizarre thing about it is, that I think the amount of churches in the city has been increasing ever since Mark Twain's era. So while in most civilised societies churches have been dying an agonizing death, slipping into irrelevance while most human beings realise that yes, there are things more important. And no, the bible is not the fucking truth, get over it! So while this has been happening, the US has been building new churches, finding shelter in the thought that at least these churches will make a great backdrop for the days after their glorious orange-man decided to finally push the \"terminate-world\"-button. \n\nOh but, already the way I got to Hannibal was a delicious experience, if I may use the term so freely. I think I need to backpaddle about three hours, maybe even an entire night.\n\nSo I told my host that I wanted to go to Hannibal to check out this city that Twain used as more than just inspiration for his Sawyer/Finn-novels. So I decided to depart from St. Louis to Hannibal, and then hop on a bus leaving Hannibal for Chicago. Well, the website stated that this was possible. Hooray, I uttered, booked the trip and thought that was that. I received my confirmation email and, staying on the theme of still being in the effing middle ages, the pdf said that I absolutely, most certainly, could not use the pdf as a digital ticket, but that I had to print it. I rolled my eyes so hard I thought my lids would pop. After thinking whether or not to yell a couple of quebecois curses at the laptop, I decided to rather tell my host what's what. Yes, I've been on the edge so hard lately because of all the crap I've mentioned before, that this annoyed me already more than just a tad bit.\nSo I asked my host whether or not he had a printer I could use. I've never had a printer myself, being a university student, I had always just printed my files on campus and had started putting my papers on my tablet lately. But I figured he could have one. Turns out he didn’t. I mean, we should all try to safe paper, right? It's not like this stuff is growing on trees… oh… My host then, shakes his head slowly and I could see him turning his eyes in thought, thinking where to find a printer at 6:30 on a Sunday evening. While he stands there, pondering, I open up another tab, as if I didn’t have enough of these annoying but amazing distractions, and look up reviews of the company operating this particular line. And of course their reviews are crappy. Not as crappy as Greyhound's I mind you, but still there is no way of defending a 2 out of 5 rating for driving a bus. And especially their boarding policy is not reassuring. Only printed tickets, customers' reviews tell me that more than just one person was left standing on a curb. And I really do not want anything like this. Especially when I'm schlepping my backpacks around with me. So my host and me, we set out on an epic quest to find a printer.\n\nWe hop into his car and take off. Some five minutes later we smash the car into and through the wall of the Walmart a couple of blocks away. To be honest, we actually just park it and walk into the place and ask the nice little lady that looked like she was a 13 year old hobbit where we could find a multi-purpose printer device. She points us into the general direction of the electronic devices isles. We stroll over there, look around like Chekov and Sulu lost in the woods, find  a guy working there and ask him for the same stupid device. No luck. They disabandonded the concept of printing around the 18th century when somebody slaughtered the last paper-dragon or something like this. Either way, they don't have anything to print with. We shrug and start walking out the place. I grad a ginger-pepsi as a waking up kick in the solar plexus for tomorrow morning, while my host tells me, that entire medical system in the US is still using fax. I don't think I've seen a fax-machine in at least 7 gazillion years, but I mean, the US is still the most advanced country in the world, right? I remember these concrete blocks they used as cellphones on The X-Files while I was learning how to operate a flip-phone. Just the same way these people here claim how much they honour there veterans but every other starving, ragged-up, done-with-life hobo I've seen in the US is a former soldier or marine. Yes guys, you're taking good care of them. But I digress.\n\nSo we stumble out of the burning wreckage of a Walmart we left behind and look for a Schnucks. By the way, anybody knows the story of this name, comment please! We drive all the way to the Schnucks. Haha, I can't stop chuckling at this name XD My host parks his car in a vacant parking spot right between two other cars, right next to the entrance. The rest of the parking lot is as empty as the first calendar I got when I was 14 or so. So I jest, that I would've been too lazy to hassle the car into this narrow spot and would've just parked anywhere. \"I guess this time I'd be more lazy than even an American.\" He smiles a very wide smile and says that he was too lazy to walk a couple yards more, so he parked the car closer to the door. America 1, Germany 0. We walk into the Schnucks like we would like to own a place with a name like this but then thought it might sound too ridiculous. We find an info-desk and ask the same question. The lady behind the counter looks either confused or amused, I'm still not sure. And then mentions that they got rid of their multi-über-combination printing-device some 5 months ago. Schnucks is abandoning the whole concept of printing. As I said: The last paper-dragon had been slaughtered already and we have been running out of paper ever since. She states that maybe, just maybe, we could find another Schnucks …… I just had to stop writing for a second because I realised how often I wrote Schnucks in just one paragraph and started chuckling again. Well maybe another store of their brand still had their über-super-killer printer and we could drive there. And thus the Sunday evening odyssey for the printer continued. We walked out of the store whose name shall not be mentioned, buying some local cream soda called \"Fizz\" on our way out.\n\nWe went on our way yet again. My host was reving the engine because he had an idea. Maybe a pharmacy would have a printing device. Btw: I am snacking on some breakfast-trip snacks my host's wife packed for me. That was so incredibly kind. Sooner or later I have to write an entry on how people treat travelers. And I don't mean fucking tourists, I mean travelers. So remind me on this one, will you.\n\n[This entry was written while I was waiting for about 15 centuries for steemit to activate my account. So it's been in the pipeline for a while now ... oh well... I hope you'll enjoy it anyways]",
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      "body": "![](https://steemitimages.com/DQmbGXMwALuD4zZvtnzKLY2SRpjQJZzCYsFn1VLa1iPg4uH/image.png)<br> Welcome to Steemit @balthorsar!<br><br>  I wish you much success and hope you find Steemit to be as rewarding and informative as I have.<br><br> Here are some links you might find useful.<br> [Your stats on SteemNow](https://steemnow.com/@balthorsar)<br> [Your stats on SteemWorld](https://steemworld.org/@balthorsar)<br> [Your stats on SteemD](https://steemd.com/@balthorsar)<br> [How to use Minnow Booster](https://steemit.com/steemit/@bycoleman/a-post-of-much-greater-value-how-to-increase-your-vote-count-dramatically-just-like-the-big-fish-do)<br> [How does Steemit actually work?](https://steemit.com/steemit/@bycoleman/where-does-all-the-money-come-from-on-steemit-fully-answered-will-it-continue-yes)<br><br> Introbot is hosted and managed with donations from @byColeman to help make your journey on Steemit truly rewarding. Your feedback is always welcome so that we may improve this welcome message.<br> Oh yea, I have upvoted you and followed you. Many blessings from @introbot & @bycoleman<br><br> ",
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      "body": "So this is my second go at a blog. Yes, I've tried this one before. It was a travelling-media-escapism-whatever blog. I basically tried to make myself look as educated and good as I could. So this time, I'll do something different. I found out two years, nah, two and a half years ago that I was suffering from a major depression, tried to cure it. And it appeared to had worked. Well, turns out it didn’t really. The depression hit again last year, I behaved like a dick and made the most important person in my life run out on me. She ran out and so far away that even after I've learned how to apologize without being back-handed about it, she couldn't hear me scream these apologies after her. And it was even greater that I was a couple thousand kilometres away from home, when she finally couldn't anymore.\n\nSo yes, this blog is going to be about everything that occupies my pan-fried brain, mostly things that come together, like travelling and diarrhea or depression and being left alone to feel miserable in isolation. Call it therapy if you will, I call it telling y'all who I really am.\n\nSo if you are offended by me sharing my stories, my experiences and especially my fuck-ups in a direct, profound and uncensored manner, or if you bring your children to read a blog as a bed-time story, a blog written by somebody telling you in the very first paragraph that they have been suffering from a depression … well, why would you do this?\nWell, and because I chose to be up-front about it, I also chose to do as little editing as possible. I write what I think, and will go all Kerouac on y'all. I do not want to edit anything out, I do not want to get rid of my typos, I want to be as direct as possible. What I do want is to get better. As a human being, a man, a boyfriend, a traveller, a street-scholar. And I want to be honest with all of you. I do not speak English as a first language. I was tortured in school by English-teacher, beating grammar and vocabulary into my brain. Hated it. And started liking it the moment I was not forced to learn it anymore, but chose to learn it independently instead. So if you see any mistakes that nobody cares about because y'all know what I want to see, keep those to yourself. If you see anything that doesn't make any sense. Feel free to ask. I guess sometimes I'll come off as a dick on whatever this is going to be, but everybody tells me that I'm a great guy, funny and friendly. Only my girlfriend knows that I get loud and angry when I am terribly sad, so don't be afraid. As long as you're not romantically involved with me, there is no reason to be afraid ;)\n\nSo anyhow. I'm in my late twenties, studied different things at the university, have been travelling all throughout Europe, South- and North America and Israel. I've been in a ton of shitty situations and want to tell all of these. They will not be organized in an orderly fashion, they will be told based off whatever I just feel like, so I hope you like nonlinear narratives. I'll do my best to make every isolated situation clear and tangible. So forgive me, but for the first few months there will be a lot of cursing and me moaning and bitching at how much I fucked up this particular relationship, which I will be using to launch the individual stories. Makes sense? Great! So let's get to it.",
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