Fun and responsibility – you have to experience mistakes yourself

You wish each other “Happy New Year” while writing or whispering “Merry Christmas” to each other. Happy That’s how you should be on Christmas Eve – while all hell is literally breaking loose in Bethlehem, as even the pastor in the Basel Cathedral said, it was the thousandth Christmas service and the church was packed like the Titanic. He blessed us, the crew, humanity, of the reverent cruise ship with both hands raised high. Coming out of church, I smoked a cigarette and immediately fainted. When I woke up again in front of the church entrance, pale as death, I thought I felt the blessing a little more clearly than before.

In the pagan tradition of Raunächte, you shouldn’t wash laundry because evil spirits would get caught in it. Especially no white linen, because the spirits might mistake them for shrouds. The Raunächte begin on the shortest day of the year. This is celebrated, especially in the mountains, with Krampus parades. I met the fur-smelling monsters in front of a Dunkin’ Donuts branch in Basel and followed them across the bridge to the Subway branch. In between, I was surrounded and sandwiched several times by small and large Krampus figures, and sometimes my bottom was spanked with a wooden broom. I suddenly thought about how ashamed I was to find a rod in my boot on Santa Claus. Wishing you a “Happy New Year” always makes me a little ashamed.

I’m increasingly wondering whether things could be organized more in an oracular form: decisions are made by solving a puzzle.

“Time is what keeps everything from happening all at once” I read it somewhere and have quoted it many times since then and it still bothers me. The past is never dead, it hasn’t even passed yet. But the present is always now, it’s always already gone.

Shortly after New Year’s Eve we drove from Freiburg to Basel. In the middle of the route, the sky suddenly became very bright – an almost biblical moment. There were three of us in the car. I immediately thought of the three kings. We are impatiently awaiting January 6th, the end of the rough nights – the mountains of laundry are getting higher and higher and the nightmares are getting more and more drastic. So we followed the orange light. That was the only option, because we were on the highway, right on the border between France, Germany and Switzerland – and at some point the light turned into a kind of smoke.

Someone noted, at first jokingly, that we were driving past the decommissioned Fessenheim nuclear power plant, one of the oldest and most poorly secured nuclear power plants in Europe, which, as it later turned out, has not been in operation since 2020. Shortly afterwards we were stopped at the border by a young policewoman who asked whether we wanted to declare something – and I spontaneously asked her whether it was possible that the nuclear power plant or the nuclear waste still stored there was burning. It was impressive to see the terror in her eyes. I probably still have some kind of childish idea of ​​authorities who keep calm and know what’s going on.

That’s actually impossible after the past year (and century) – but it always takes a while for this information to become somatized or penetrate the unconscious. A strange realization that I always have: You have to experience things (especially errors) yourself so that they penetrate your consciousness and take root there, leaving traces so that you can draw conclusions from them.

In any case, we each took an iodine tablet, which I like to take anyway because of my hypothyroidism, and which, as I learned yesterday, are apparently sent to the Basel women once a year by the city; precisely because of the immediate proximity to that nuclear power plant. And I thought about it all night that it is truly incomprehensible, the ever-present threat of radioactive materials, simply because they are invisible. My grandfather was a nuclear physicist, and I inherited a few of his research objects, enigmatic pieces of metal that I put in the back of my attic because I’m still afraid they might give me radiation. He really was an incredibly neurotic and I often fear I inherited his tendency to approach even the most mundane with existential security precautions. The symptom has, so to speak, eroded and been inherited.

Since this incident I have been suffering from strange symptoms, which I naturally attribute to diffuse radiation sickness. I’m afraid I’ve never been this close to the mindset of conspiracy theorists: I imagined that the nuclear accident was being covered up from the unsuspecting population. The highway that night had been very empty.

Shortly afterwards, my concerns were replaced by a new post-holiday challenge: Our friend M. had given us a turkey for New Year’s Eve dinner, already prepared, which we didn’t eat that evening because we had already grilled 40 Merguez. The next evening he wanted to pick it up again so he could eat it himself. I was disappointed because I would have liked to eat the turkey myself – and there were other guests to entertain. The shops were still closed. We discussed for a long time whether it was “appropriate” to take a gift back. In the end we decided to ask M. a riddle, a kind of Turkey test, which he should pass.

We asked him: What are three keys that can’t open doors? A monkey, a donkey, a turkey. The result was unpleasant for everyone involved. M. took the turkey home, pissed off and without having solved the puzzle.

Nevertheless, I increasingly wonder whether things could be organized more in an oracular form again: decisions are made by solving a puzzle. A spiritual, but not necessarily religious, worldview.