heil!

We signed up a book by an author who turned out to be not only a Nazi sympathizer, but an active member of the Nazi Youth, which had gone underground and had been secretly recruiting members since after the war. I found this out when he turned in his manuscript. It was a rather banal memoir, except that every other paragraph was an excerpt from the Nazi Youth Guide for Active Boys and Girls. I was given the fun task of extracting the guide, line-by-line, before the book went to press. I stayed up all night, removing what turned out to be a rather fascinating outdoor survival guide with no mention of Nazis or any of the untoward activities one normally associates with Nazis. There were plenty of instructions for starting fires and tying knots.

secret protocol

I was backpacking through a city that was kind of like New York but with even more Asian people. At the hostel, I fell in with this scruffy older man who looked kind of like a less well-preserved Jeff Goldblum. He took me to a shitty looking restaurant and told me a secret protocol. We were to order pancakes and then wait in the kitchen. After our waitress walked away (not into the kitchen), a cupboard opened and a family of four crawled out of the cramped storage space. They provided us with a map that turned out to be a fairly standard and boring walking tour of the city. I was disappointed in mangy Jeff Goldblum. He was not the street-savvy traveler I initially mistook him to be.

travel plans

A couple of my friends were coming to visit, and to save costs, we had them shipped in cold storage. One of the friends was rather tall, so we had to remove her head to fit her in the container. In the back of my mind, I realized this was probably a bad plan. But it all worked out. They arrived and thawed out, and my friend's head popped right back on. She turned to smile at me and said, "hi!" Phew.