The Death Lichen of Doom

Again I'm too lazy and too uninspired (my muse hasn't shagged me for a while, I guess) to come up with anything new, so I'm posting some old ramblings again. It's again from some 3 years ago. Have fun.


The Tree-dwelling Death Creature From Hell

Geographers are usually very friendly people, outgoing and kind. But sometimes, when they get bored, they will do crazy things to you. Normally, students of geography in the first semester are the target of these actions of craziness. Stupid enough, I am one of those students, so frequently I get to do things I wouldn’t even imagine doing in my dreams.

Just recently, our tutors came up with the idea of going out to a park in Basle and count lichen on the trees. Now this would be crazy enough all right, but considering that it was already late and dark and raining and cold outside, this was downright insane. Of course this made it all the more attractive to the geographers. Since it was impossible to talk our way out of this, we set out, in small groups, huddled closely together, towards the black horizon.

Now if we knew what expected us in this park we would never, not in a million years, have dared to set foot in this gruesome place. The trees were soaking wet, dripping icy rain drops all over the place and the seemingly liquid ground sucked up all our walking noises. It was cold, even though we had our arms wrapped around each other. It was dark, not even the moonlight seemed to be able to penetrate these cursed rain clouds of doom.

Slowly we forced our way deeper into the darkness of the woods. When we arrived at our designated area we found our tree, which looked as though it was about to crash down on us at any moment. It didn’t, in the end, but I swear it dropped those rain drops on me on purpose. We had just started examining the stem for lichen when suddenly one of my female colleagues, who was standing right next to my ear started screaming like a complete lunatic. After I had recovered from my heart attack and made sure that I was not deaf I went over to check what the heck the matter was. As it were, the matter was a spider at least the size of a pea sitting right in front of my colleagues face on the stem. Naturally, this caused her to rouse all the evil creatures that dwelled in this wood and which would now come crushing down on us to see if we were food.

In the end we managed to get out of the park alive, and we had even found some lichen. We will bring those to our tutors. I will also bring along the spider to see if my colleagues screaming is as scary for the tutors as it was for me. And then I will kill them.

The Dangers of the Mosh Pit or How to Become a Real Heavy

Since I am too busy to annoy anyone with the horrid smearing I call original writing, I'll just post something I have written years ago for an English lesson at University. Andrew might recognise it :). Here goes:

We all remember Kurt Cobain. Kurt Who? Kurt Cobain, who was the legendary singer of the legendary grunge band NIRVANA, and who decided to end his life his way: the jam-a-syringe-the-size-of-Arkansas-containing-
heaps-of-cocaine-into-the-arm-way. Naturally, this made his arm explode, so he shot himself. The cool thing about it is that it made him and his former band legends.

A few years later, therefore, NIRVANA was the first music band in the “Rock” sector that I heard of. I liked them. And they were hip at the time. Everyone wanted to grow a Marlboro-man-beard (we were 13 years old then) and we had hair-dos that certainly did look great, if we had only managed to see who we were constantly bumping into.

Today my hair is sort of short again and I am older yet not wiser. I still go to Heavy Metal and Punk Rock Concerts. Recently the Gods of Heavy Metal visited Switzerland – Iron Maiden came to destroy Zurich’s Hallenstadion. Of course we had to be there. In my best (read: worst and dirtiest) shirt and trousers I got out of the tram and was welcomed by someone I had never seen in my entire life falling into my arms. He smelled of beer. Home Sweet Home! Fortunately my friends had beer too so even if the stadium collapsed – which probably it would – we’d be having fun. Once in the building we cheered the clouds of smoke floating above a layer of intense reek of beer and farts. I could live here.

After the supporting band had banged their heads so many times they did not know which way they were going, and therefore fell off the stage, there was the mandatory silence before the storm. Except for the burping, grunting and farting that is. When darkness fell we knew that doom was approaching, or the electrics had failed. It proved to be the former. Iron Maiden was on stage and virtually blew us away.

Bruce Dickinson’s voice was far from terrestrial. Immediately when the music started there was an elbow flying towards my face. With the instinct of the genuine drunk heavy I did nothing and it hit me whack! just above the eye. With the instinct of the genuine drowsy knocked-out I checked for blood and when there was none I continued trying to get stomped to death. But the dangers of the mosh pit (that’s the area in front of the stage where all the crazies are) are manifold. For instance you risk singing so loud that you will have to go collecting your entrails on stage after the gig. Then there’s the danger of flying things, shoes, toys, bottles, heads etc. I got hit once by my own shoe, which I had lost two minutes earlier. The greatest danger, apart from getting stomped into a smear is, of course, getting squeezed to the size of a, say, mosquito.

But this is all worth it. He who went through the mosh pit will forever dwell in the Halls of the Great Heavy Metal Fans. That’s where I would be now. If I found my entrails.