PARIS TO GENEVA

A short while ago I was using a restroom in the Char Du Lyon train station. I had to pay 50c in Euros for this privilege, and somewhere in this mixed use restroom that has women on one side and men on the other a child is crying in a stall. I honestly haven’t had any real sleep in almost 24 hours and this child’s caterwaul has me imagining some sort of prank where you sit on a toilet and imitate the pain of an anal fissure. He’s thrown up. He’s told the attendant and I peek in the stall at the same time he leaves it and there’s a vivid radish of fluid sprayed over the rim. The attendant sighs as the kid wipes his hands and he sniffles and snuffles and slips out the toilette.

Everything was fine until I disembarked my plane to Italy and started making inquiries, and I’m becoming more confused the more tired I am, here on Avenue Daumesnil waiting two hours for a train I will be taking to Geneva, drinking espresso outside a café and watching people smoke indoors as I doze off from time to time writing this. The weather is perfect and I have just wandered this street up and down and it appears to me that personal electronics and antique restoration/fancy home knick-knack stores somehow belong here. More Gothic Revival architecture, some of it quite stunning, and some excellent tagging. In many ways it’s as if I haven’t left NYC, but the air is cleaner. It might have recently rained. I see a fight between some bums, and street level alcoholism seems to be as prevalent here as it is at home, only the shouting matches sound a bit more sophisticated in something other than English.

My energy converter doesn’t work here.

I won’t forget to mention the subway I took from the airport to get here is filled with all sorts of wonderfully fucked up people, many of whom seem to have a bit of the struggle one gets with drugs. The cars are colorful and packed during rush hour with no air conditioning. There is a unique scent in the crowds, a faint odor of the liver processing alcohol.

With much difficulty I eventually purchase a ticket and catch the train to Geneva and soon leave Paris. Everywhere is graffiti and tagging, as much here as in New York, with the same sad affect when it becomes overbearing and visual noise. I could barely stay awake during the 3hr train ride from Paris, fervently reading The Road by Cormac McCarthy whose apocalyptic content was a strange contrast to the pastoral countryside that gave way to rolling hills and villages reminding me of other places back in the States: Idaho, North Carolina, places in Washington and Canada even Portland. Europe isn’t vastly different in it’s geography from the States, it’s the history and what’s happened here over the centuries that makes it unique and prestigious.

It took me nearly 24hrs to finally arrive in Geneva. Maria is waiting at the station when I arrive and though I am dead on my feet we go out to eat and have coffee and we stroll along lake Geneva with the the Jet d’eau (the city emblem) illuminated and visible from just about everywhere. Crowds of people are gathered at an outdoor bar as alcohol is the universal language. Geneva is old, cosmopolitan, and beautiful like most cities especially are at night.