ALBERTVILLE: Yes, it comes from the movie “Tampopo,” which literally means Dandelion (in Japanese). It’s a film about a woman, a cook like me, trying to create the perfect ramen; believe it came out in 1986 (sic: 1985). Her restaurant in the movie has the same name as ours. *We* are seeking the perfect ramen.
ME: Hold on. I think we’re having some technical difficulties. Yes, my power cord was loose, sorry (PRESS). Yes, now it’s on. Continue… (TBC)
Filed under **VIRTUAL SL, 0048, 0410, Europe, Wubbel
I stumbled out of the Athens restaurant, trying to get away from the doubling and the confusion as fast as possible. The tape wouldn’t work, the tape wouldn’t *work*! And I didn’t know where I was; it was all a maze of streets and jumble of people, people everywhere going in all directions at once. I couldn’t stand it any longer. I felt I was going to scream. I did. I wake up.
—–
He’d heard about a bar up the coast under new management and decided to check it out. “Pirates,” he muttered while pulling in and seeing the treasure map graffiti on the outer wall. But some of them are okay, he remembered. Like Randolph, which started him wondering where in the heck *is* Randolph the Bastard Pirate? He hadn’t seen him in years, it seemed. Anyway, he thought, better head in. Gotta get past that outside pirate first, he he. I’ll bump him real good to make sure he knows who’s the boss. “‘Scuse me fellow.”
Hmm, just passed right through the guy. One of those lifeless flatties, he thought.
And then, inside the bar, more flat, a haircut this time, apparently ongoing judging by the proximate hand with buzzing razor.
“Corona Ultra then, lady,” he ordered after picking his seat and getting the name of the house brand. He needed more alcohol to deal with the strangeness here, but then was greeted with: “We only got Non. No actual booze here, not after the attack by the alcoholic sea monster. Don’t want a return,” she said flatly, as was her overall style and the overall style of the bar as a whole, starting with the flat treasure map, the flat pirate flattie leaning against the front door outside.
“Oh. Okay. A Non, then, I guess. Do I still have to–?”
“Yes,” she said, anticipating the end of his question about paying for the thing he doesn’t desire. She’d heard it before. Several strangers coming here and asking the same. Like Peet Pelican over in Juho. Like Sachie B. from Vortexville, Raymond from Redwoods, Stillman from Stiletto Heels Hills. Drinkers like to drink what they call the real stuff, the real thing. But she’s aiming to change all that with a Non brew that will knock them off their heels, especially Stillman with his stiletto shoes I suppose.
While he was waiting for his drink he didn’t really want to pay anything for, the man simply known as Biker further inspects the place. “What’s with the robot?” he queried.
“Oh, came with the place,” she said while pouring. “I guess that it dropped down from the hillside above sometime during the renovation and just got lodged inside. So I set it upright, let it walk in place again. He’s harmless. I think. Anyway, I haven’t decided if I want to keep him or not. There’s another one, another robot — smaller — still up on the hill about to tumble over the side too. Maybe he’ll join him soon. Dunno, in summary. I call him Clocky but he doesn’t speak, he doesn’t have any soul that I can tell. Maybe he just needs reactivation.”
“I see.” (TBC)
Filed under **VIRTUAL SL, 0048, 0407, Europe, Jeogeot, Nawt Vaya, NVFS, South Lake, Vortexville
He told me to back up a bit more and I finally saw it, the double vision he spoke about before locking into place like a renegade magic eye. 2 halves of the restaurant directly overlapping each other through a crossing, slots in one seeming to be perfectly filled by the other.
The ears of the mirrored central woman with the flaxen hair is whispered into by the dark hard woman on either side, perhaps the most obvious communication between the now combined spaces. I could even make out the hushed words they shared: “I am instant.” With this, the two instantly became untangled, the special vision was over and the restaurant returned to mundane, like a master magician snapping one out of hypnosis. Albertville Mercury Spaghettiboro was back at his noodle cooking station inside the customer encircled kitchen, unable to be spoken to any longer. He was never here in the first place. But what was said before the transfer knocked me on the floor, kicked me in the shins, insert whatever idiom for shock and awe you wish here. Fortunately I made sure I recorded at least the meaty part of our imaginary conversation. 🙂
Looking around to doublecheck everything remained stable, I went into the men’s bathroom to play, making sure noone else was in it; just couldn’t wait. I killed two birds with one stone (another idiom!) while sitting on the commode. PRESS
ME: Yes, now it’s on. Continue… (pause) You were talking about the origin of the restaurant’s name (I prompted). (longer pause) Albertville?
I cut off the machine along with the pee. Something went wrong! (TBC)
Filed under **VIRTUAL SL, 0048, 0406, Europe
Well it was absolutely the worse place Lexi and I could have gone. The slurping the slurping! We could only stand it for a second then had to mute the whole location. We’d have to read lips from now on. Luckily lips are like one pink and we had no problem with it. Carrcass+1.
“About the dandelion!” I said if only to others, the words understood as mere vibrations to myself physically and in my head mentally. Lexi couldn’t take any more and exited the scene stage left, not even being able to stand just visual. Those mouths those mouths!
“Yeah, what about the dandelion!?” responded the waitperson closest to me, 2 plates in his hands and one spinning on his nose, just kidding about the nose. But as deftly as he was handling those plates with 3 bowls apiece full of steaming hot noodles he might be able to pull it off. I could tell he could pause only for a second, which was reinforced when he said, “Hurry up, man!”
I hesitated again and he was gone. Waitress I’d had my eye on next. “Miss, oh miss!?” She presently had 3 drinks in her two hands and one arm, that 3rd tucked behind one of the ones in the hands, reader’s choice. Not a nose once more but pretty impressive still. “Hurry it up, bud!” she said, kind of mimicking the man. “The dandelion… what is the signif—!” But she was gone with the “…”. I had to learn from past mistakes! We’ll… 2 of them. Dammit!
Next: the ramen cooker. Albertville Mercury Spaghettiboro I learned, an Italian by way of Stockholm and Lima. I had to lean in real hard from my stool at the crowded counter to get his attention back in back. “About the dandelion!” I pointed almost straight up now to the most significant card picture (to me) attached to the metal partition encircling the kitchen at the center of it all instead of forward like before. “Significance?!” I uttered as simply as possible but still with perhaps too many syllables. Caught him right at the start of his break. And, big break, he was a big fan of restaurant lore. *My* big break.
15 minutes and 15 seconds later, we got to the mention of “tartar mosquito” in that badly translated Tripadvisor review which led me here in the first place. Success! (TBC)
Filed under **VIRTUAL SL, 0048, 0405, Europe
We’re in the original Amsterdam this time, not the New one over in America also known or more commonly known as New York (, New York). Famed Red Light District: not quite what I was expecting (!). Where are the XXX signs, the scantily dressed prostitutes lining the streets, distracting all our thoughts and motions? And, most importantly and more broadly, where was that gall darn golden auto that was suppose to be here waiting for me?
I’ve searched everywhere, every street, alleyway and side path. I’m beginning to think it was STOLEN, Grand Theft Auto style. One gap replaces the other?
Abruptly switching back from day to night, I reinsert the entrance to the library into the gap in an attempt to make things right again. Was I wrong to press the button? Did that cause all *this*? And did I really even press it in the first place? These questions haunt me to this day.
Or not…. Whatever: goodbye Red, Yellow, Green, Blue. I’m certain I’ll meet one or two or three or all 4 of you in another day in another light. See ya then. Be safe. And… thank you. For being my friend in that time.
Ahh, *there* you are. It worked!
But they were diverted away from the chase by the smart ass fox shockingly revealing who she actually was into a series of traffic cones leading their car directly into the back of a fake commercial truck where they were robbed of all the gold they were carrying and then dumped back into the desert, potential end of story. Until the fox traded apples for a banana and turned into a man.
“My SISTER??! Working on thee STREEEETTTS???!”
Filed under **VIRTUAL SL, 0047, 0510, Europe
“We can’t go back to Holland again?” he questions, staring at the newest image on the screen.
“Oh Eddy, we can’t even get to the top of Mt. Sandraman without being distracted, much less another place in another world. Be here in the here and now. Be Free.”
“Let’s go!” he urged. But he stood still.
—–
“Oh look, the image is changing into something else we know. Wallytown. On (nearby) Fishers Island. Remember?”
“Of course I remember,” responded Shelley, still standing behind him in her finest cashmere bathrobe, still waiting on a decision. Where to go, where to go? Somewhere away from *here*. Or at least go to that hill that likes to call itself a mountain *within* here, pheh. She tires of being chained as an object. 6 6 6 is over. It’s now 7. Freedom.
But they stood still.
—–
Too late, Eddy. Too late. The dream Spider has arrived.
(to be continued)
Filed under **VIRTUAL SL, 0047, 0201, Europe, Holland, New Island^, Wallytown/Fishers Island^
The building where our Peter Bergmann, with two n’s, stayed the last nights of his life was called, generically enough, the Sligo City Hotel, soon changed to The Address but with the same one. Interesting that a sign pointing in its direction on the other side the street from the bus stop — where it just so happened Bergmann wrote his mystery word or sentence or whatever he subsequently ripped up — is positioned directly above that hand-with-pen in this June 2018 Streetview screenshot.
Switching back to the 2024 Streetview photos of that mural, the most recent as I write this, we see the pen pointing directly to a bicycle in the parking lot before it from this perspective, specifically its seat. Personal sync here: the wife and I were just playing around with adjusting a bike seat at a local gym the day I found this pen in a Sligo mural pointing to same. I instantly recognized the connection. I’d started going to the gym, and taking up stationary biking in particular, to attempt to heal a fairly long lingering back issue, longer than usual in my history of such ailments. Set your rear down here to get healed, the mural seemed to indicate in a queer triangle of associations. And as I write this, the back seems to be healing up. I can move on — by staying stationary? Also time to get on the move again, as in moving outdoors from the gym.
But not before strengthening the CENTER.
(to be continued)
Filed under **VIRTUAL OT, 0046, 0103, Europe, Google Street View
The pen he used to sign in to the hotel registry produced not his actual name, though, but a pseudonym, not quite a pen name since, as far as I understand, he wasn’t an author on the sly, although he did write down something else later on at the town’s bus station and then promptly rip it up, in all likelihood not even classifiable as a tiny poem so brief was the scribbling. Peter Bergmann was not the real name of the person standing before the hotel clerk jotting that name down. Nor was his address “Ainstettersn 15, 4472, Wien (Vienna), Austria”, which he also claimed through the same pen on the same piece of paper. Instead here we have someone who wanted to remain anonymous, bound to perform a task that would complete a life no one in the public eye would perhaps ever find out about, set aside these final 4 days. Beginning here — actually beginning in Derry where local CCTV footage also recorded him entering the bus that would take him to Sligo 135 kilometers away in the west of Ireland.
Peter Bergmann never existed, or, better, never existed as the person who came to Sligo, Ireland from his native land to die. And he made darn well sure no one would ever know his real identity.
What happened next? Among the most interesting events: 13 trips out of the hotel carrying the same purple bag which left full but came back, well, not even empty but even visible.
Purple. Hiding something. Keep that in mind.
(to be continued)
Filed under **VIRTUAL OT, 0046, 0102, Europe, Google Street View
BEGINNING OF “SUNKLANDS PHOTO-NOVEL 46”!
So eventually I was able, with repeated shoves, to physically push Tobor out of the water and onto the shore until he seemed to kind of settle himself directly on the line between land and sea, my first big indication of what was going on here although I didn’t know it at the time. It could be construed I was saving the figure from drowning, but, if so, that’s certainly not the full story. The guy was dying, that’s a fact. And he seemed to be going out on his own terms. But something happened at the shoreline, something quite unexpected. He didn’t have to *choose* the way he was heading and was so hesitant to accomplish. He could simply wait on the shore for death to come to him. *I*, through character Greg Ogden here, had created that option, that scenario. Soo… who am I?
—–
So we’ve started “Sunklands Photo-Novel 46” with this figure directly trodding the line in his odd gait between sand and tide. Time to reveal who he is.
No, not *that* Peter Bergman. Or Bergmann if you use the Austrian spelling of the surname, where he claimed to be from. Although that’s what first caught my eye about the name when a related video popped up in my algorithmically generated Youtube feed, being a big big Firesign Theatre fan since back in college days. More on that soon. No, instead it’s *this* Peter Bergmann, seen here checking into a Sligo, Ireland hotel via CCTV footage on the evening of June 12, 2009, 4 days before his death in the same area. Cause of death? Heart attack. *Not* drowning. Keep that in mind.
(to be continued)
Sunklands 