There is only cool and uncool and how you feel. And fried train trains.
“Oh man, there are so many cool things we don’t do!” My last born’s complaint echoes into the evening. Oh shit. Well, he’s almost 8 now, it was just a matter of time before he too would eat from the tree of this sobering realization. So now it’s out. There are actually a lot of cool things that we don’t do, and there are more and more every day. If you look closely, I can’t really think of any cool things that we actually do.
Cucumber crocodile and cheese mice
Wait: Does writing columns for the Musikexpress count? So please! In my little world this is almost as cool as it gets, but it sucks – sorry! – unfortunately not so with the specials in the 2nd class. As a cool “dad” here in the country you would either have to bring something with football or tractors. The former is out of the question for me, and I can put our Massey Ferguson 135, built in 1974, between my Neil Young and Steely Dan records. So: figuratively speaking.
What’s even more reassuring is that the boys didn’t get their reality shock while scrolling through some blogs about kitesurfing in Bali, base jumping in Rio and can punching in Wacken, but – which I personally think is cool enough – while scrolling (!) in one old (!!) cooking (!!!) book (!!!!) with crazy food decoration ideas from the early 80s, keyword cucumber crocodile and cheese mice. Vegetable faces. Fried potato train. All cool stuff that we’ve actually never done before.
Why is he telling us this?
Now you ask: Why is he telling us this? Has it gone to his head that he can write columns for the ME? Counter question: Do you actually know how far you have to compress the earth? would it take for it to become a black hole? Now you might think that it can’t be that much anymore; If this continues like this, the whole place will implode soon anyway! But it’s still quite a bit – the earth would have to be compressed to 9 mm in diameter! There would be a lot of rattling in the box, and then I would like to see Merz and Söder blame THAT on the traffic lights again. Yes, I admit, I watched “Alpha Centauri” again, the very old episodes – cosmological excursions from 25 years ago, the ultimate escapism from an earthly present that breaks your heart seventy-seven times every day.
Yes, yes, in 1998. There was no AfD, no 9/11 and no smartphones, but there was a Middle East peace process, climate change was still called the “ozone hole”, the FDP had just been kicked out of the federal government, there wasn’t even real NuMetal yet, and Rammstein could be seen as a novelty band for one summer. Golden times, if you look at it that way. How? Do you think it’s uncool that I mentioned Rammstein, AfD and climate change in the same breath? And to whom exactly? Doesn’t matter. Now I’m going to carve a potato train and put it in the pan. So that something really cool happens in this household.
This column first appeared in Musikexpress issue 12/2023.