Distasteful Rambling

Panda, my bow-legged designer dog, ate the bag of semi-sweet chocolate chips.  Two hours later, she's yacking all over the damn place, chunky bile that smells like chocolate malt.

To the animal hospital, where there are girlie girls in blue scrubs and howling dogs in the back (it sounds like a full moon).  "Sit in this room," and we do.  Panda's behind the scenes and the two of us are sitting quiet in this white and metal room.  Then, she walks in.  First, I just see her thigh-high boots, then her mini dress, and her white lab coat.  She walks in, stilettos puncturing the cheap linoleum floor and... wait a second, she turns, clipboard in her right hand... and her left side's facing me... and she's got no arm.  Her white lab coat is folded back neatly with a safety pin.  Bless her heart.  Suddenly, it's okay.  It's okay that she's dressed like a major slut because she only has one arm.  My heart goes out to her.  And she goes through her clipboard, crossing off the to-do list.  "First," she says in a professional manner, "we're going to induce vomit with an injection of Toxi-ban...then, a Cerenia injection..." and she goes on, spitting out Vet lingo and "fluid maintenance" and "fluid pump" and "fluid what-not."  And bless her soul.  She's got spunk.

Chocolate, Beer, and Estrogen

I get there five minutes late.  He's pale-faced and and has a small pointy nose, and he walks to the left and drags his right because of a coma he had ten years back.  This isn't how I remember him being (actually, I don't remember him at all) and I feel sick when he approaches me, smiling, and says, "I didn't think you'd come."  And then a little bit later he asks, "Remember what I told you about our kids?"  No, I lie. 

There's something very womanly about his frame and demeanor (and it might be the female hormones that he injests once-a-day because his throat doesn't produce them).  Mostly, it's his feminine arms and stomach.

He shows me around his neighborhood and we eat doner kebabs and there's a slab of Berlin Wall preserved and displayed in the street.  I take a picture of it.  Later that night, I'm drinking Orval and he's drinking Diet Coke.  He talks a lot about himself, how he likes to sing and how he wants to move to Toronto in five years.  He stops talking and I ask him if he's had a drink since the accident and he says that the taste of alcohol makes him sad and I'm on my third beer.

Brussels is confusing.  It's metropolitanized and French and Flemish and German.  It's a conglomeration of cultures and with the E.U., it's difficult to decipher what Belgium actually is. 

It's good beer harvested by monks and great chocolate and too much of the two makes your cheeks tickle. 

I meet Andreas on the train from Brussels to Berlin.  It's very "Before Sunrise" and he's my Germanic Ethan Hawke, or so it seemed.  He schedules me into his digital planner while out-of-focus scenes of the green German country-side swish past his head.  In three weeks, at 2:05 PM, we'll meet at Place de Luxembourg.  He grabs his empty suitcase from the over-head, and beckons goodbye.  Before hopping off the train, he runs back to my seat, on a last-second whim, and, fucking everything up, whispers, "We're going to have three kids."  Just like that, and he disappears.  I wish he didn't come back and, although I'm willing to pretend that it never happened, it unnerves me. 

When you're all alone traveling, people you meet on the road become romanticized into warped perceptions, false realities.  It's not until later, after the initial rush of human interaction, that you sober up and realize that maybe you're just a little bit lonely.