5th to the 8th of January

I believed that as long as I was on holiday I can keep up posting daily. That has obviously not been the case. I’m thinking of gathering prompts and posting once a week. It’s fewer E-Mails and notifications for you and more to read. I’ll call that a win.

January 5th: Select a family picture and write about the things you don’t see.

Look, this is a home we made. You don’t see the tooth the little one is missing having lost one headbanging to some death metal song. You don’t see the year and a half we have had to spend apart one in Shanghai and one in Erzgebirge. A couple of moves we had to do to build a nest that houses a cat once found in a dumpster in Shanghai, a new cute addition to the family that now has a Kindergarten right in front of the building. The success both us grown-ups have found with jobs that are great and make us enjoy our nest even more. The ups and downs of arriving at a Christmas that feels like it is just for us, for our little family and to be happy, truly happy with what we have and roots slowly making their way into a soil that is meant to last, to support our structure and lives.

January 6th: Same picture but describe it as if you would first see the people in them.

It’s Christmas the people in the picture have set up a Christmas tree that illuminates the family and the room but the smile of the woman in the picture radiates more than all the light sources. The little one has an expression like she wants her curiosity to suck every piece of information and joy through the lens. The cat doesn’t want to be there but accepted her fate of getting hugged and dragged into pictures. The dad seems content and probably had some Christmas drinks. I wonder what they eat at Christmas. Hopefully not potato salad and sausage. They probably make their own traditions when it comes to food choices. They might have chicken feet, dumplings, a rabbit and potatoes for Christmas. Definitely want to get to know them better and be friends with them.

January 7th: What was the strangest and/or funniest thing during the last week?

This is a really tough one. As mentioned earlier I have been on holiday. Funniest thing is almost every week or day when the little one starts to make up random songs. Love every single one of them and both us parents sing them randomly too. Super catchy. Super fun. But it’s almost a regular thing.

We decided to visit one of our friends for his birthday not too far from Stuttgart. Since we are a bunch of weird people we made every step of the way fun and lined our stomachs with beer and “Pfeffi” (a peppermint liquor) while talking a lot of nonsense. That being said culture finds a way into conversations and we witnessed the place where the first zepelin landed and some shenenigangs happened. We imagined how it was when that happened, how people back then reacted and shared stories of us or firends at parties and reminsced about times that made us laugh. For the uninitiated it is hard to describe what happens or happened. When you know fellow humans so well that the little quirks show, the chances arise where one could put a finger in a wound a wind someone up, but of course you don’t do that. There is just situational comedy everywhere you look. But again, here is the strange. If you look closely there are intertwined human connections everywhere. Turns out in that little village next to an army base an aquiantance used to work. One of the guys I went to the Lionheart concert last year that I reviewed. Most of our friend group is from tiny little villages in the Erzgebirge and yet we managed to span almost the whole globe with friendships, relationships and memories to share. Countless touch points that span a web of moments of former kids from small villages leaving a mark and having an impact on other people and connecting the next hub to that web and pulsing life through it. I am incredibly happy for the friends and memories we share and the lasting positive impact that makes the people smile. Burn for something and you get an eye for the thigns that make you laugh and the strange connections you find if you just look closely enough.

January 8th: Every scar tells a story. Tell me yours.

I have three that tell a story. There is one on the top of my skull. a circular shaped one that I have since birth. A probe got stuck on my head and opened up my head and I came out bleeding from my head. Will always be there and it doesn’t impact me at all.

On my forehead exactly where my hairline starts there is a scar that you can barely make out as it basically just made my hairline more even instead of dipping slightly in th middle. Way back we were playing in a city with our band and not a lot of people knew us there. I recently got rid of my dreadlocks and had my head shaved. A friend sometimes did make up when we had a gig and I had red and black lightning painted over my face and skull. Long story short, at some point I decide to jump from the stage and aggrivate and mosh with some people. But I jump and come to sitting in front of the stage. I continue my inital plan but people just look at me shocked. At some point during an instrumental piece I leave the stage to wipe the sweat, red and black from the face that started running. The security grabs me and asks me if I am alright in the head. He drags me in front of a mirror and there is a gaping wound on the top of myforehead. Blood gushing. Mixing with the red and black from the makeup running all over my face. We clean it and tape it a bit. Later they staple it and now I have an even hairline and some shocked kids that probably won’t forget that weird new metal band where the singer jumped of stage and hits his head on a beam and flies onto his butt in front of the stage and then starts bleeding profoundly aggrivating the crowd. Good times!

The third is 2 tiny little ones on my left knee. I trained martial arts, snowboarded, biked, hiked, did weird stunts, moshed and was careless almost everywhere but never broke a bone imn my body. One night in Shanghai that should change slightly. I had a Fxie (a bike with a fixed gear that can be had for like 150 to 200 Euros there) and I had it more than a year. Not the cheapest parts but it served me well. Biking home after I bar visit I stand up to overtake a car. Suddenly the crank and pedal fall off and the force generated to drive the pedal down and the bike forwarded concentrated on the pavement and I drove my leg full force into the ground. I was afraid to look at my leg. I called a friend and he helped me up and call a taxi. I went home. Not wanting to go to a hospital right away I told my now wife to pleace get me whiskey for the pain. I woke up ever hour or so to take another shot or two to visit a hospital the next morning. My Chinese friend helped me get there. No one offered a seat or wanted to help until the possibility of getting paid was cleared out of the way. I got my knee fixed and those 2 scars are a bit of a reminder why I decided to leave China. Not because the doctors thre didn’t help. They were tremendous, but for the sheer lack of care in extreme situations. The first person that helped me get to the side of the road was asking “This was your own fault, right?” to avoid responsibility from the onset. Weird. Still miss Shanghai sometimes but the place has changed. Those are my scars and these were my stories.