ZONETOAST

½ km

2026-06-08T19:30:00+02:00

I was lucky my elementary school was only half a kilometer away from our house, so from an early age I was able to walk there and back. In younger years our nanny took me there but I hardly remember those walks. Later I really enjoyed going to school by myself because I could focus on all the small details on the way.

Having left our house and walked around the corner I loved sliding my hands along the thick oval leaves of the tall rubber hedge that bordered our garden. After that I usually checked if the red Volkswagen Passat of our next door neighbor Opa ██████ was parked in the driveway or not. Further down the road, I had to rush past a certain gate because an evil German shepherd lived there, and nothing scared me more than big dogs. Then came the house with the hippies my parents always ridiculed for their organic and antiauthoritarian lifestyle and I had to cross a small street.

The main attraction here was the cigarette vending machine mounted on the empty beige wall of a house at the corner I liked to investigate thoroughly, checking for coins in the change return slot and inspecting new cigarette brand logos and typesets. Camel was my favorite. Then came some nice wild looking gardens with a lot of flowers. Sometimes I got stressed about being late for school after zoning out for so long that I completely lost track of time. I didn't have a watch back then, but I quickly memorized which types of cars parked at the curb had clocks on their dashboards.

Like with the cigarette packages I got more and more interested in the different logos, icons, and typefaces on cars, on car door windows, car headlights, hub caps, and bumper stickers. They inspired me to spend time during class creating my own logos and experimenting with various fonts. Luckily, I shared this fascination with █████████, who took the same route to school as I did. Whenever we met on the way, we would discuss our favorite icons, invent secret organizations that might use them as logos, or argue over which logos were ours. I vividly remember the stylized cat logo of SEV Marchal, which could be found on many Renaults and Peugeots, being my favorite, while █████████ favored the four pointed compass-rose star shape found in the Subaru logo.

After school, I usually stopped by the convenience store and candy shop directly across from the school, a location that was, in retrospect, a marketing masterstroke. There I would spend my pocket money on gummy bears, chewing-gum cigarettes, and rum-flavored chocolate balls, all of which seemed perfectly normal to children growing up in 1980s West Germany. Or I bought Panini sticker packs for my albums, most notably those based on Disney's The Jungle Book and the WWF—the wildlife conservation organization, not the wrestling federation. That came later.

Sometimes other kids from my class joined me on the walk home, pulling me out of my private world of logos and typefaces. Since I lived closest to the school, our front steps became an unofficial after-school hangout. We'd sit there laughing, shouting, and wasting time until I finally went inside and the others continued on toward their own homes.

Wookie

2026-05-22T16:00:00+02:00

I have known ████████ since elementary school. He was the tallest in my class, and something always seemed a bit off about him. I liked him enough to invite him to a birthday party once. At least until he catapulted chocolate pudding at the kitchen wall with his spoon, to the amusement of all the other kids, and nearly got himself kicked out of the house and barred from ever coming back by my mom.

Later, all throughout high school, we were both in the same class. We were never close, but I liked him. At least privately. He was always a bit hyperactive and nervous, and his thoughts seemed to outrun his speech, which made him stumble over words, drag one into the next, and fill the gaps with drawn-out uuuhms and strange moaning sounds, which, together with the long straight hair that fell well below his shoulders and sometimes hid his face, earned him the nickname “Wookie.” He was generally made fun of by almost everyone, usually following the lead of the class bullies. I probably took part in that to some degree, which I am not proud of, though I often felt sorry for him.

This did not keep us from maintaining a kind of distant friendship, mainly fueled by our shared interest in Battletech, other science fiction book series, and computer games. We sometimes met, half secretly, after school near the bicycle stands behind the gym to exchange books, have brief conversations about them, or share strategies for beating LucasArts point-and-click adventures like Maniac Mansion or Zak McKracken.

I sometimes regret not having had the courage to spend more time with him despite teenage peer pressure, but the need to belong and play the social game was as much of a minefield at that age as it is today. That reminds me that I still have the dark brown sheet of paper with the exit visa codes (early ’90s copy protection!) from Zak McKracken somewhere that he lent me, the one you needed to travel between places. That might be as good a hook as any to get back in touch with him.

Lustgarten

2026-05-22T12:50:00+02:00

In the two decades I have lived in Berlin, one of the few places that has held an unusually magical vibe and meaning for me is the immediate area around the Berliner Dom, that monumental cathedral on the Museumsinsel in the heart of the city. Its voluptuous neo-baroque appearance contrasted sharply with the socialist architecture of nearby Alexanderplatz with its iconic TV-tower punctuating the skyline, especially during the years when the brown, glass-clad, monster of the Palace of the Republic still cast its shadow over the area. The church overlooks the geometric Lustgarten park stretching toward the column-lined, Roman temple like, Altes Museum. The atmosphere has always seemed strangely out of place to me. Like fragments of imagined cities thrown together into one almost dreamlike landscape.

A particularly unforgettable moment tied to this place was one July afternoon in 2002. The weather was unusually bad for mid-July, with occasional rain showers and gusty wind. My girlfriend, a handful of old friends, and I sat on the grassy area north of the cathedral with a hundred or so others, drinking beer, smoking cigarettes, and listening to the concert of French electronica/dream-pop duo Air, from afar, the music drifting across the park from the Museumsinsel Festival just a few hundred meters away. Their music had played a crucial role in all of our late coming-of-age. I recall letting myself get caught in a gripping swell of Air's ethereal soundscape, the music building tension in complete synchronicity with the increasingly violent bursts of wind tearing through the chestnut trees, swaying them in a dance to the beats, carrying hundreds of leaves into the sky and sending them spiraling around the oxidized copper tips of the cathedral's towers. The harmony between the elements felt so perfectly choreographed that people in the little park began clapping and raising their voices in spontaneous joy.

Several years later, on a late summer evening, crossing the Lustgarten with my iPod on, emotionally shaken and lost in anxious thought after the end of a five-year relationship, insecure and afraid of what lay ahead, I found myself suddenly transported back to that moment. The gritty big-band horn hook of The Prodigy's "Stand Up" faded into my consciousness when something in the sky caught my eye. Above the cathedral that was glowing in the evening light, an enormous flock of thousands of birds was murmurating. Just as the track's breakbeat and fuzzy bassline kicked in, building toward the first drop, the fluid mass of birds shape-shifted into a tongue-like wave painting a black-speckled upward spiral into the orange sky. The convergence of image, sound, and my own emotional state hit me with such force that tears sprang to my eyes and I had to sit down. It was a moment of simultaneous grief and breathtaking joy, instantly resonating with that afternoon with Air years earlier, and I lay down on a stone bench and kept watching the birds, the track on loop, for I don't know how long, crying, desperately trying to hold on to the moment for as long as possible.

Grease Pit

2026-05-21T18:00:00+02:00

My brother-for-a-year, █████, had started a spring break job as a dishwasher at the legendary Babe's Chicken in ███████ to top up his pocket money. One day he asked me if I was interested in a weekend job. His boss, who also owned a successful country cooking restaurant in ██████, was assembling a crew to launch a Tex-Mex food stand at the brand-new Texas Motor Speedway, which was about to open that April. I was thrilled by the opportunity and accepted immediately.

After battling traffic chaos due to heavy thunderstorms and a delayed influx of NASCAR fans in caravans and pickup trucks arriving for the weekend event we reached the venue sometime around noon. An underground tunnel led us into the vast infield of the 1.5-mile quad-oval monstrosity, whose sheer scale I had not anticipated. The newly completed hundred-million-dollar speedway was apparently the third largest of its kind in the world at the time. The infield itself felt like a small city: an eleven-story tower with condos, countless garages, VIP boxes, a hospital, a helipad, and parking space for more than a thousand RVs.

Our food truck was a bus-sized container right in the middle of it, fitted with a sales counter and full kitchen facilities. We put on the provided white shirts and dad hats emblazoned with the pink-and-yellow Bubbacito's logo, were shown the equipment, and received a crash course in the tacos, quesadillas, burritos, and nacho plates we would be preparing and selling over the coming days.

Business began slowly. One of my first tasks was to roam the infield with my colleague █████████ to hawk for customers among the technicians, promoters, and drivers who still outnumbered the actual race fans. In the meantime the other two team-mates ran the kitchen and sales. Due to the unexpectedly severe weather, the qualifying round had been canceled, so we expected plenty of race team personnel with time to kill and, hopefully, empty stomachs. In reality, drumming up business went far worse than expected, and apart from a handful of customers, things were not going well. I started to get bored.

Then an idea began to take shape in my mind. We needed to change strategies. I approached ██████, who was struggling with the cash register anyway, and asked her if she wanted to swap positions. I briefly knew her from high school, where she was somewhat infamous for embodying a walking caricature of mid-90s bombshell femininity: peroxide-blonde hair, puffy lips, and a rack that left little room for ambiguity. And to round it off, her intellect seemed determined not to undermine the branding, to put it kindly. █████████ was more than happy to trade my company for hers, and, as I had hoped, the newly reconfigured customer acquisition team proved significantly more successful at landing sales among the NASCAR bros.

Throughout the day, the weather only got worse. Many of the parking lots surrounding the speedway became so flooded that the Texas Department of Transportation had to turn parts of the highway into makeshift parking. The unsurfaced dirt campgrounds in the surrounding area had turned into swamps, and their temporary inhabitants wisely stayed put instead of wandering the infield and spending money as every vendor had hoped. As a result, our already lowered sales expectations went completely down the drain.

Right before my unsatisfying shift finally ended, I pitched one last idea to the replacement team, who had just arrived and been briefed on how underwhelming the day had been so far: if the race fans would not come to us, why not bring the food to them? Why not turn our takeout business into a delivery service for a change?

Teammate ██████ remembered that we had an electric golf cart parked nearby for restocking runs that could easily be repurposed. Armed with an amenity map, a notebook, and a pencil, two girls from the new team hopped into the cart and zoomed off through the tunnel to take food orders from the stranded RV dwellers in the flooded parking grounds outside, which we had already dubbed Waterworld.

The next day must have been quite uneventful and boring because I don't remember anything about it except that the food delivery idea had been spot on. Apparently, the late shift the evening before had sold so much food on delivery runs that barely any leftovers remained. On this day the weather had fortunately cleared, and our Tex-Mex junk food had become an unexpected morale booster for the Waterworld population outside. Word of mouth proved to be far more effective than what our increasingly desperate sales tactics had failed to do, and more and more customers started finding their way to our food truck.

The actual "Interstate Batteries 500" race and official inauguration took place the following day. Texas weather had decided to show its best side, and more than 150,000 NASCAR fanatics had found their way to the grandstands, with several thousand more filling the infield. The place was absolutely packed. The opening spectacle delivered every Texas cliché one could possibly hope for: horseback cowboys, stunt parachutists, a military jet flyover, and the suitably braggy helicopter arrival of landowner and Texas business tycoon Ross Perot Jr. and Governor George W. Bush. The atmosphere was electric, and business was booming without any need for active marketing.

I was especially thrilled to spot actual celebrities wandering the infield with their entourages: bad-boy basketball star Dennis Rodman shaking hands with some of the drivers, and, much to my excitement, Sandra Bullock in the flesh, looking absolutely gorgeous, and probably there to promote her newly released flick Speed 2: Cruise Control.

The race itself turned out to be a hot mess, with the very first turn of the opening lap featuring a devastating 13-car pileup. Later, another driver spun out near the finish line and triggered a second crash that took eight other cars with him. Several racers later openly criticized the brand-new track as so difficult to drive that it might require a complete redesign.

As someone who had never cared in the slightest about sports, let alone car racing, and had fully expected nothing but greasy hands, boredom and a testosterone-soaked cringefest, I ended up having an absolute blast. I left with extra dollars in my pocket, a solid reputation for my one-man German efficiency initiative, and the quiet satisfaction of having accomplished all that as a mere foreign exchange student who didn't even possess a work permit in the first place.

Downtown

2026-05-20T18:00:00+02:00

A weekly activity during my teenage years in Heidelberg was going "into the city," which meant taking either my bike or the tram to downtown and following an almost ritually fixed path that took a few hours to complete, incorporating stops that satisfied all my special interests.

I usually started at Cocktail, a small but well-stocked comic book store where I would spend at least an hour browsing graphic novels, peeking into the rather explicitly pornographic pages of Heavy Metal, getting lost in the works of Moebius, or checking the latest arrivals in the manga section, especially anything involving mechas or cyberpunk themes. I became a devoted fan of the Appleseed series and bought each German translation as it was released.

One snack option was then to head to McDonald's, find a corner, stuff myself with a McRib or Big Mac, and lose myself in Kino News, the free periodical from the counter featuring reviews of upcoming films. That generally provided enough energy to handle the next obvious destination: Galeria Horten, an enormous seven-floor department store in a horrendous post-war modernist style, instantly recognizable for its glass facade and dizzying tile patterns wrapped around its cubiform mass.

Caring nothing for the excessively intrusive nightmare of surplus goods and squirming hordes of consumers, I usually entered through a side-entrance and headed straight for the book section in the rear left corner of the ground floor to check the latest science fiction paperback releases. Then I'd sneak into the tucked-away elevator just around the corner, avoiding the horror of having to navigate the deliberately deceptive escalator maze, and ride up to the music CD section on the fourth floor. Back when I was still in my pre-metal alternative rock phase, I discovered a huge amount of music here by choosing random releases based purely on the album art, and asking the guy at the counter if I could give them a listen. The fastest escape route from here was up to the next floor, a huge cafeteria with panoramic windows overlooking the 1960s vision of progress below: tramlines, bus platforms, and multilane roads tangled together in a pedestrian nightmare. A separate glass elevator connected the cafeteria directly to ground zero, providing a swift escape.

To recover from the exhausting experience of Horten, I avoided the main pedestrian shopping mile of Hauptstraße and strolled along a much quieter parallel street all the way into the heart of the old town. The only reason to venture into this tourist-trap was a small, easily overlooked shop in a side alley called Fantasy Island. In its dark, cramped room, packed to the ceiling with board games, tabletop role-playing games, model-building kits, dice in every imaginable shape and color, books, and collectibles I felt like in a hidden sanctuary for nerds. At random times, half of the already far too small shop would be blocked by groups of highly concentrated, long-haired, bearded adepts of Warhammer, carefully moving platoons of self-painted dwarfs, orcs, and other armored creatures across large tables covered in minutely detailed three-dimensional landscapes resembling distant planets or fantasy worlds, where epic wars were underway. I watched these events in envy and awe or sat in a corner studying books filled with schematic blueprints of mechs I recalled from the Battletech novels I was into at the time.

My social batteries recharged but now hungry, I would usually head back through the Hauptstraße, sometimes grabbing a taco or bratwurst on the way. My last destination before heading home was a large toy store tucked away in a crowded shopping arcade, where I would try out the latest releases for Nintendo and Sega consoles if other kids allowed me or browse through card games and toy weapons.

In later years, when my tastes in music and reading had evolved toward more sophisticated niche genres, I tended to avoid the crowded places altogether and spend more time in some of the more off-the-beaten-path shops. Bookstores aimed at a more academic or university student crowd attracted me like magnets, and I would take detours to hidden backyard record stores that had lesser-known artists in stock for me to discover, with staff who were generally far more knowledgeable and patient than those in the mainstream places.

Another option was always the public library, a place I had loved ever since I first stepped into it as a child. I remember spending hours and hours poring over comics and scientific picture books, and later discovering authors I would read obsessively, such as Stanisław Lem or H.P. Lovecraft. They even had a small occult book section in which I spent far too much time. And CDs to borrow (and illegally copy to cassette tapes). I vividly recall countless afternoons in that library, carrying around notes of things I needed to research to satisfy my curiosity and fill in gaps that our Encarta '95 CD-ROM encyclopedia at home could only insufficiently cover.

In retrospect, "downtown" was the chronotope of my teenage becoming. Those weekly trips were how I discovered music, books, art, ideas, and subcultures that shaped my identity. When I'm in Heidelberg I still occasionally walk the same route, though almost none of the shops still exist. And yet these ghosts of places continue to carry my memories: specific albums, books, games, moments of discovery, even moods I was in when they happened. Encountering culture then felt tangible and biographical, tied to places, moments, chance, rather than the timeless, placeless abundance of the digital today. God, I sound old.

Green Pub

2026-05-19T20:30:00+02:00

This was my favorite thing to do after a nice family evening at ████████, where I usually spent some time drawing or running around outside near the tennis court with █████, before indulging in a three-course meal of shrimp in garlic sauce, a steaming dish of cannelloni, and ice cream for dessert. I loved it when mom and dad got slightly tipsy and ignored our usual bedtime in favor of another hour of partying.

This usually happened spontaneously whenever we passed through the large marble floored hotel lobby with its coloured glass shard mosaics and paper-maché parrots, on our way to the bungalow near the tropical garden. Just before the staircase leading home we had to cross the pool-view balcony, crowded with people smoking, drinking and swaying to pop hits from the last decades. This magical place was called Green Pub and I loved hanging out there despite being so young. Mom would light a cigarette and order some wine at the bar while dad started dancing in his peculiar way that █████ and I found both funny and embarrassing.

The room was tinted in shades of green and flecked with the racing stars from spotlights bouncing off discoballs and glass mosaic pillars. Grown-ups danced and smoked everywhere and there were sometimes film projections behind the bar. I remember one mesmerizing video of a bird flying across the sea and through clouds in slow motion (probably "Jonathan Livingston Seagull" from 1973). Sometimes we danced with our parents; other times, while they danced, we ran around collecting coasters, paper parasols, and glitter palm tree picks from empty cocktail glasses.

Today I would probably roll my eyes at the tacky hotel disco with its sticky floors, dated music, and questionable drinks. But back then it felt like stepping into a dreamlike emerald cave, where time stood still and treasures waited to be discovered.

Marooned

2026-05-19T13:30:00+02:00

The sailing regatta began and there I was in a dinghy together with █████ and "the Wookie" of all people. The bottom feeders of our class, thrown together to race the cool kids. How the hell had I ended up here? To be fair, half the class had simply assigned me my old role from before I left for a year abroad. The other half were thrown off by how much I'd changed and treated me like a newcomer. Who was I? The old loser or the new alien? Either way I accepted my fate and got ready to lose. But first, let's go back to the beginning of the week...

I had just returned to my old high school in Germany after ten months in the US, arriving just in time for a week-long school trip to a lake in Austria. Having been thrown back into the old social circle of my class I realized quickly how much I had transformed - from the shy computer nerd with glasses who blushed whenever he talked to girls, to a relatively self-confident alternative surfpunk type dude who knew cool bands that hadn't even made it to Europe yet.

Fortunately, some of my formerly cooler friends had been impressed enough by me, or maybe rather the music I'd introduced them to on the train ride, that they let me stay with them in their hostel room. While half the class headed to a local pub around the corner with our two teachers, I followed my roommates outside. We stopped at a nearby gas station, where they picked up a six-pack of cheap beer and a bottle of some clear liquor. I tagged along with a can of soda. Then we headed to a nearby parking lot, where they lit a few hand-rolled cigarettes. It didn't take long to notice these weren't regular cigarettes. The smoke carried a thick, unmistakably herbal scent. Wait. Was this...?

When we got back to the hostel later that night, the others had already returned from the pub, and judging by the noise, everyone was tipsy and nowhere near done partying. It seemed I had a lot of catching up to do. Back in the States, where drinking wasn't legal until 21, I'd only heard stories about the secret parties I was never invited to - let alone allowed to attend. Before my exchange year the majority of classmates had still been half children, with a few usual prematurely rebellious suspects who were already spiking their drinks and puffing cigarettes. Meanwhile, in less than a year, adolescence had apparently turned half my classmates into seasoned drinkers and some of them into dopeheads.

We spent most of our days at the lake, where half the class took a windsurfing course and the other half learned to sail. I was part of the latter group. We learned different knots, nautical terminology, and practiced sailing maneuvers like gybing and tacking, turning with or through the wind and trying not to capsize in the process. I genuinely enjoyed learning all of it, though I seemed to be in the minority. Most people were busy recovering from hangovers and already looking forward to the next round of drinking after sunset.

The regatta on the final day was less about sailing talent and more about who was still functional after a week of partying. That was exactly how I ended up in a boat with █████ and the "the Wookie", since the three of us were among the very few who had actually paid attention and cared about what we were doing out on the water.

Unfortunately, nerdy interest in sailing turned out not to be enough to win races. A minute into the regatta, it became increasingly obvious that my two shipmates had not exactly spent the previous evenings practicing knots. Their reactions were slow, their timing completely off, and every other maneuver dissolved into confused giggling.

We crossed the finish line gloriously second last.

ᚠᚨᚲᛊᛁᛗᛁᛚᛖ

2026-05-18T12:00:00+02:00

"This looks like it's for you,” my mom said with a frown and a smile, handing me the sheet of thermal paper. It was a fax with a French sender number in the header and handwritten text in large black marker letters. The text was written in Elder Futhark, the oldest form of the runic alphabet, which was used by Germanic peoples until around the 8th century.

The fax was from my cousin █████████, who lived in ████████, France. We had always been very close, always inspiring each other with the weirdest ideas and plotting secret plans to take over the world or simply wreak havoc on our families. We shared a nerdy fascination with Scandinavian black metal and other niche genres - the more brutal, the better. We were both good at drawing, fascinated by satanism and demonology, Nintendo games, manga, fantasy novels, weird cartoons, and of course Beavis & Butthead. We usually only saw each other once a year, when our families would meet in ███████ or ████████ during the fall holidays to go hiking and spend time together. The rest of the year, we mostly kept in touch by sending each other arcane faxes. The internet hadn't been a thing yet.

We obviously worked for a secret agency called ███. Our codenames changed constantly. At one point I was Blackjack and he was Azagthoth. Our imaginary boss was M.A.G.G.O.T., and much of our correspondence consisted of planning and briefing each other on secret missions.

In the beginning, we wrote in English, even though we spoke German with each other in real life, simply because it felt cool. But it wasn't secret enough, and our moms had a reputation for reading our private stuff, so we had to come up with something better. Given our shared niche interests, Elder Futhark as a parent-proof code was the obvious choice. I'm still not sure what to do with this particular life skill, but to this day I'm fluent in reading and writing runes.

I translated it without thinking. The message turned out to be an urgent operational briefing from ███ headquarters regarding a supervillain named ███. It concluded with strict instructions not to bring the ██████ ████ Nintendo cartridge.

Multiband Dub

2026-05-17T19:30:00+02:00

My parents had gifted me a portable Sony multiband world radio to take with me for my ten-month stay as an exchange student in Texas. It was a cute idea: something that would allow me to tune into German-language shortwave broadcasts if I ever felt homesick. In reality, I never used it for that purpose. But the radio nerd in me was thrilled to have even more frequency bands to explore than on my trusty bedside radio back home. Instead of using it to stay connected with Germany, I mainly used it to dicover exciting new FM stations I could pick up in North Texas.

For the past few years, the music I had listened to was mostly Scandinavian black metal: Emperor, Immortal, Setherial, and the like. Even back home, that taste had marked me as fringe, but in the US it was seen as utterly bizarre, strange European nonsense, even by the "freaks" at my high school. But since I had already left part of my old self behind, I was ready for new music too. Having arrived at black metal through a more mainstream-compatible alternative rock path (Nirvana, The Offspring, etc.) I was open to anything with distorted guitars. The Dallas/Fort Worth stations KDGE, The Edge, and KEGL, The Eagle, quickly became my defaults. I discovered the local grunge-punk band The Toadies, who were huge at the time, and was soon swept up in the summer of 1996 hype surrounding Sublime, whose charismatic singer Brad Nowell had recently died of a heroin overdose just before the breakthrough release of their self-titled album. I would remain a huge Sublime fan for years to come.

Another great discovery was KNON, a non-profit, listener-supported community radio station with the weirdest, most wonderfully lo-fi fringe programming: from religious service broadcasts to nerdy late-night heavy metal shows. Despite my usual preference for distorted guitars, my favorite evening program became a reggae show hosted by a Jamaican DJ, which opened my ears to the cavernous soundscapes of dub music. It was there that I discovered my love for artists like King Tubby, Prince Jammy, and Dub Syndicate.

I soon came to appreciate that my little multiband radio ran on AA batteries and had a headphone jack, which meant I could even take it with me on the school bus and zone out. I was the only junior-year student who had to ride the bus, since my host parents would not allow me to accept rides from classmates. There, I listened to the morning commute rerun of the wildly inappropriate Howard Stern Show, syndicated on KEGL, and loved every minute of it. I still remember the ongoing fad of women being asked to call into the show to compete in "queef-offs", as well as an listener call of some freak who claimed to have collected his semen in a jar under his bed.

American radio seemed far more freewheeling than anything I had known in southern Germany. Pure bliss for a pubescent teenage guy during the peak Beavis & Butthead era.

Go West

2026-05-17T14:00:00+02:00

It was time to board the bus. I was scared and excited at the same time. I gave my mother, father, and █████ each a long hug, then stepped onto the express shuttle that would take me from Heidelberg to Frankfurt Airport. I don't really remember why we decided that taking the bus was a better idea than all of us driving to the airport for a longer goodbye, but at the time it seemed fine. I could hardly believe what lay ahead of me: a ten-month stay as an exchange student in a suburb of ██████, Texas, USA.

The last few weeks had been strange and exciting. I had pored over the Texas travel guide my parents gave me for my birthday and examined the photographs my American host family had sent, trying to imagine the life that awaited me. My mother insisted I throw a goodbye party for my school friends in our garden, even though I was shy and far from one of the popular kids, which made the whole thing feel awkward. A small booklet was passed around for everyone to write farewell messages. I found the whole gesture really cringe. Some of the cool kids had secretly brought alcohol and spiked their sodas and juices but I was really uncomfortable with that. We were all barely sixteen, barely of legal drinking age in Germany. I had never tried drinking despite the peer pressure, afraid of the effects and knowing that my parents would not approve. At some point two of the guys were even smoking a cigarette outside on the street. I was horrified.

As if the anxiety of not seeing my family for almost a year were not enough, I was also struggling with a strange chronic cough that had been bothering me for weeks, possibly even months. My father had even dragged me to a lung specialist, but no real cause could be found. At night, I had to sleep on an inclined mattress just to reduce the relentless urge to cough. It was maddening.

I took a seat at the very back of the coach and looked out through the rear window. My family stood on the sidewalk, waving, and I waved back as the bus pulled away. I kept watching them until they disappeared from sight. Then I turned around, settled into my seat, and gazed at the urban landscape sliding past as we made our way toward the Autobahn.

That was the moment I took off the glasses I had worn for my lazy eye since kindergarten, for what would turn out to be the last time. I never needed them again. It was only about a week later that I realized my chronic cough, too, had mysteriously subsided. It felt as though, somewhere between Heidelberg and Frankfurt, an old version of me had been left behind. It was time for a new me. A new era.

Voyage, voyage

2026-05-17T12:00:00+02:00

After dropping my wife and daughter off at Seville airport around dawn, kissing them goodbye and hoping they would be fine, I drove to a nearby petrol station, filled up our Ford Transit escape vehicle, and continued toward Huelva in the morning sun. My head was full of racing thoughts and worries. It had been a difficult morning. ██████ had suffered a crisis of confidence. The plan had been for her and ████ to fly ahead to ████████ while I followed a few days later with the van on the ferry, sparing her the crossing because we knew how prone she was to seasickness. But the thought of being separated for almost a week, amid the chaos of constantly shifting travel restrictions, had suddenly become unbearable to her. We had talked through every alternative, but in the end decided to stick to the plan. It really did feel like some kind of escape.

I could hardly believe we had made it this far. After what had felt like half an eternity of endless preparations, weeks spent renovating the van, getting rid of clutter, sorting and packing our belongings, preparing our apartment for a sublet, we had finally hit the road. All our anxieties about roadblocks and checkpoints in fully locked-down France, and about unpredictable regional travel restrictions in Spain, had turned out to be just that: mere rumours.

It had taken us a day and a half to drive across Germany to the French border, which we passed without encountering any of the feared controls. After a stop in ███ ██████ in Occitania, where friends welcomed us with good food, wine, great conversation, and the luxury of a real bed, we continued west toward the Atlantic, the Pyrenees always to our left. Only the changed road signs told us we had entered Spain. Again: no borders, no police, nobody stopping us. After a dizzying drive through the tunnels and viaducts of the Spanish Basque Country, the landscape suddenly opened into the vast rolling plains of Castile y León beneath an overwhelming expanse of blue sky. It felt like freedom made landscape. That evening we camped on a small hill between ████████ and Valladolid under an orange-tinted sky, the wind carrying the scent of pine and thyme. The final stretch south into Andalusia had also gone smoothly, and we had reached Seville, where we spent the night parked in the middle of the city.

I exited the A-██ onto the A-███, taking a detour along the Andalusian coastline. I don’t remember exactly where I was when the next song came on the radio, but it was David Bowie’s epic track Heroes. I had never really been a Bowie fan, but I sang along, feeling my body relax and my worries begin to fade. Then, somewhere in the second or third verse, when the reverb in Bowie’s vocals kicked in...

...out of the blue, I burst into tears. Not just a little, I hadn’t cried like that in years. Tears streamed down my face as I all but yelled the lyrics while the blurry landscape rushed pas me:

We can beat them, forever and ever. Oh, we can be Heroes, just for one day.

It was a profound moment - a true hero’s journey moment. I felt somehow physically relieved and, at the same time, utterly overcome by despair and an almost unbearable feeling of nostalgia and grief.

As the song faded out, it gave way to the French 80s hit Voyage, Voyage by Desireless. The last time I had heard it was as a child, when it had been a hit on the radio decades earlier. It held no particular meaning for me, and yet the nostalgia and the strange synchronicity of that very moment was so overwhelming that my tears kept flowing.

Au dessus des vieux volcans, Glissent des ailes sous les tapis du vent, Voyage, voyage. Éternellement.

De nuages en marécages, De vent d'Espagne en pluie d'équateur. Voyage, voyage.

Vole dans les hauteurs, Au dessus des capitales, Des idées fatales, Regardent l'océan.

I almost had to pull the car over. Tears blurred the road ahead until I could barely see. My whole body shook, and I sobbed like a child. At the time, I couldn’t understand what was happening to me.

Only in retrospect do I see it clearly: some deeper part of me had already recognized what lay ahead. This was our turning point, the point of no return, the moment every hero's journey ultimately arrives at. An era was ending. A world was ending. After this, nothing would ever be the same.

What had begun as a temporary escape plan: to spend the winter months on ████████ until the chaos of the Covid-19 pandemic subsided, eventually became a two-year residency as expats. And true to what some part of me had sensed on that drive, nothing was ever the same again. We never returned to our old life in ██████. Instead, our journey carried us onward to ██████, where we would live for several more years.

Flotsam

2026-05-16T22:46:00+02:00

I focused on scanning the edge between the warm, anthracite-colored dry sand and the pitch-black wet sand, where seagrass, sticks, plant debris, bird feathers, frayed pieces of rope, and plastic objects of every shape and color formed a meandering line along the beach. I enjoyed finding all kinds of treasures: oddly shaped driftwood or curious objects of unknown origin, always hoping to find a message in a bottle or real pirate loot. The surf here on the west coast of the island was raging loudly and sometimes waves would lap around my feet. I remembered to watch out for the black lumps of washed-up tar that looked like smooth pebbles, because stepping on one barefoot was a nasty surprise.

Mom, dad an my sister █████ were still behind, running playfully along the black beach of ██ █████, this empty and forsaken coast that reminded me of pirate books or the shoreline from the Goonies movie. I looked up ahead where the bay gave way to a towering, jagged black cliff, with massive volcanic rock outcrops jutting from the sand and the sea, battered by the incoming waves. Next to one of the large rocks on the beach I spotted something strange. It was a large object, definitely bigger then me, and although as black as the surrounding lava rock it looked artificial. Excited I started running towards it.

The closer I got the more details emerged. It seemed to be a large metallic sphere. What on earth could it be? I shouted over the noise of the waves, frantically gesturing for my parents to hurry and pointing toward the mysterious object. I was a bit scared but my curiosity was stronger. As I approached the thing I could see that it was broken. A gaping hole in one side revealed the orb's hollow interior. Strange protrusions covered its outer shell making it look like some giant sea urchin. I heard my dad shouting for me to be careful and not touch it. The shere was encrusted with barnacles, shells, and strands of seagrass and I thought it looked unbelievably cool. Then I realized I had seen something like it in one of my books about ships and submarines. It had to be one of those old naval contact mines from the war. Definitely the coolest beach treasure I had ever found but unfortunately not one I could take home.

Overcome

2026-05-16T21:00:00+02:00

I clambered up the dune, the hardened surface layer crumbling underfoot and slowly sloughing downhill in cascades of warm desert sand. At the top, I followed a narrow sandy path between patches of sharp black volcanic cinders and dried thorny scrub until I reached my favourite spot right at the edge of the pitch-black lava cliff that contrasted so sharply with the white sand below.

From up here, I could see my parents and █████ at the foot of the bluff, stretched out on their beach sheet, basking in the sun, absorbed in their reading. As always, the whole scene looked almost unreal: the bright blue sky, the turquoise Atlantic stretching to the horizon, and below, the endless white beach set in stark contrast against the black volcanic landscape. God, how I have always loved this place.

I hit play on my Walkman and let the low-slung trip-hop beat of Tricky’s "Overcome" lumber into my consciousness, its ghostly string loop drenching me in seductive melancholia. Steeped in indefinable teenage emotions, I took in the whole moment, my mind gently drifting between all the childhood memories tied to this place, the beauty of the here and now, and the endless possibilities of what was still to come. It felt like a timeless moment, both eternal and already slipping away. Some part of me accepted that even something which had once seemed infinite would come to an end: the age of blissful childhood holidays with the family.

Freq Surfing

2026-05-16T16:00:00+02:00

Early bedtime was not a problem for me. At least not on Sundays and Mondays. I was looking forward to indulging in my secret evening pastime: surfing the radio waves. The white plastic clock radio right next to my bed had a mono jack, so only the blue in-ear piece of my GameBoy headphones worked but it seemed like a practical feature because it allowed me to hear when parents would potentially come upstairs to bust me.

On Sundays I usually enjoyed the last minutes of the SWF3 Top 20 music charts and as a consequence a lot of the pop hits from that time have been burnt into my core memory. Then at 9pm sharp the news came on, which I usually followed with curiosity despite not understanding much of the complex world of grown-ups. But it was through that little radio that I lived through the weeks leading up to the fall of the Berlin Wall and the slow collapse of the Eastern Bloc. Once the weather gave way to the traffic report, I knew it was time to turn the tuner dial.

Each Sunday and Monday after the news, I tuned in to SWF1 for the part of the evening I looked forward to most: the radio drama. I recall countless evenings in my bed listening to suspenseful nail-biters, from detective stories, murder mysteries to science fiction tales. The sci-fi nights were my favorites! The intro music was already so terrifying I could barely listen to it.

My vivid imagination turned those radio plays into thrillers far more vivid and intense than TV shows could ever depict (not that I would have been allowed to watch those anyway). Many of the plots and scenes stayed with me for weeks, sometimes years, and even today I still find myself researching the titles of stories I remember from my radio days. My favourite voice actor was, and still is, Christian Brückner, the German dubbing voice of Robert De Niro, Robert Redford, Dennis Hopper, and others, who lent his intimate, smoky, weathered baritone to many of my favourite detective characters.

Through the sci-fi dramas I encountered authors I would cherish years later when I read their books, such as Stanislaw Lem or Isaac Asimov, and while I mostly enjoyed the otherworldly adventures, some of the darker stories absolutely terrified me. One especially troubling one revolved around a group of criminals sabotaging self-driving cars in a futuristic city to kidnap the passengers for harvesting their organs. I was barely able to sleep afterwards and the idea haunted me for years.

The radio dramas were usually an hour long, and depending on my levels of tiredness and terror, I sometimes felt the need to lighten the mood before surrendering to sleep. My usual routine was tuning over to AFN to listen to the syndicated Dr. Demento Show, a whimsical comedy program that introduced me to artists like Frank Zappa or Weird Al Yankovic.

On other nights I'd just sweep the whole FM band and get hooked on interesting music tracks or weird radio shows. When I felt very adventurous, I'd even switch over to AM and went exploring there. Stations in the late 1980s, early 1990s experimented a lot with the medium. I remember curious radio formats, like a live fantasy role-playing game with call-in adventurers and moderator dungeon masters, or late-night programs devoted to all kinds of arcane themes, explored through music and conversations with invited guests and callers.

One thing I often came back to was dialing the tuner down to the lowest setting, around 87 MHz, where I'd find a strange, repetitive series of warbling and beeping tones. I found them mysterious and fascinating, and that would send my imagination racing with theories about what they might be. Decades later, I remembered those strange sounds and even tried to recreate the experience, but there was nothing to hear around that frequency anymore. Some research eventually revealed that the transmission was from some kind of early one-way pager system called Eurosignal that broadcast between 1974 and 1997.