How to define kafkaesque?  Certainly, the phrase “of, pertaining to, characteristic of, or resembling the literary work of Franz Kafka” doesn’t begin to do justice to the connotation of fuckedupness[1] the word possesses.  Dictionary.com’s number 2 definition is just a bit better: “marked by a senseless, disorienting, often menacing complexity.”  Perhaps a picture is worth, at least in this case, 20 words:

Tetsuya Ishida

Back in my glorious undergraduate days, on a Saturday just around midnight one winter, a young woman named Margaret and I were picked up hitchhiking on Main Street in Columbia, South Carolina, after the city buses had quit running. I lived in North Columbia, a seven-mile trek through the nowhere that is everywhere, that soulless six-lane Shoneys/Circle-K/autoparts-studded commercial zone that leads into every municipality in this great nation of ours.  I mention the circumstances in an attempt to mitigate somewhat the sheer anti-Darwinian stupidity of  hitchhiking at night in a capital city with an attractive coed, especially after my brush with kinghell serial killer Pee Wee Gaskins some five years earlier, but that’s another, too-oft-told story.

Donald Henry “Pee-Wee Gaskins

As we were standing on the curb, thumbs thrust out, a jacked-up Oldsmobile Toronado pulled over, and, of course, we hopped on in.  The driver, whose neck was as red as the background of a Confederate flag, was accompanied by a short black man with an eraser-like afro – an odd couple indeed, as if Early Gracye of Kalifornia and Sammy Davis, Jr. had teamed up to be best friends.  After we piled into the back seat, they said they’d take us to my place, but they needed to pick up some weed first.

Oh great.

What transpired afterwards might be classified as sort of kafkaesque: an outdoor drug transaction in which our chauffeurs purchased a tiny bag of skankass cannabis for twenty 1975-dollars. No, they weren’t ready to take us home.  We had to see the black man’s paintings, so we drove to his concrete block shack where we smoked stems and seeds of the alleged marijuana and the black fellow showed us “his art”  – crude framed caricatures that you might find painted on the outside walls of a body shop.  Essentially, we were their prisoners.   Eventually, Margaret fell asleep on the couch, and the redneck pulled out a handgun and pointed in my face.  Not knowing what to do, I sat stupidly and impassively. The black fellow told him to put the gun away, and the redneck eventually passed out. The black painter finally took us about a block from my house (I wasn’t about to let him know where I lived).

As creepy as that abbreviated narrative might be, it nevertheless lacks the absurdity of true kafkafication, though the black fellow’s paintings skirted awfully close.

an approximation (the walls were covered with abominations like this)

When he was a resident of Hungary, younger son Ned experienced something like the real thing – true Kafkaquesness – as one overnight train ride from Munich to Budapest  demonstrates.

Before I let Ned tell the story, I’ll preface it by sharing that it had been a particularly good week for him at work.  The first grader he teaches who had threatened to kill everyone in the school wrote him a sweet little note:  Hi, Ned.  I’m sorry I was so evil in your class.

On that bright note, Ned took off to Nuremberg for a fun-filled four-day weekend.  Take it away, Ned.

First off I’ll start by saying the Hungarian word for emergency is vészhelyzet, and the German word is Not. I think the Germans need a one-syllable word for emergency because they get upset and panicked if things don’t go exactly to regimen. I used to make fun of them for their attitude towards efficiency, but after these few months in Hungary, I appreciate it now.

The whole weekend was kind of weird. I don’t know how much I should tell you about it, but I’ll err on the side of too much.

The couple who had visited me in Budapest and I were there in Nuremberg, and the girl kept hitting on me. Her boyfriend informed me she had a crush on me. We were leaving through the masses of the crowd, and she started groping me (not unlike the guy who had robbed me in Budapest) and walked away. That was the last I saw/heard from them, which was especially bad because I was supposed to stay with them the next night.

On the bus back to Rasim’s (my Turkish friend), I sat next to a guy who had dug up a five-foot tree from some sidewalk somewhere. There was a trail of dirt from the entrance of the bus to where he was sitting.

The next night I bumped into some people I sort of knew. There was this other guy with them…very drunk and aggressive and sociopathic seeming.  He went off with me to buy a drink and said “don’t worry; I’m not gay,” and my alarms went off. 5 minutes later, he asked me to blow him, and I gave him a forceful no and eventually lost him in the crowd. These situations are occurring at a higher frequency this year. Like father, like son I guess [. . . ]

When a Romanian girl came onto the train, she asked if I spoke English, which I always welcome when foreigners ask me. We made small talk for a minute and then crashed in one of those closed compartments on the train.

Suddenly, the girl started screaming.  Two thugs had come into the compartment and stolen her bag, i.e., all of her money and her passport.  We chased after them, calling for the authorities.  We caught up with one of the thieves, but when we demanded the bag back, he merely smirked, and the conductor of the train shrugged her shoulders as the Romanian girl screamed in English, “He stole all my stuff.  He stole all my stuff.”

At the next stop, the thief got off the train, but as it ended up, the girl found her bag in the restroom with nothing missing.  A few minutes later, the conductor came with paperwork and became furious when she discovered that the girl had found her purse. The conductor had wasted three minutes of her valuable time filling out paperwork in vain!

The Romanian’s mood started improving gradually, as she had escaped the Not. She told me she had just been to Amsterdam and said she still thought she was high. Wearing a candy bracelet, she showed me the Space cakes she was bringing back and would occasionally pull out circus peanuts and other sweets. I guess maybe she was still stoned.  She had said she was 24, but she looked and acted like she was 20. Romanians are often very petit though…

We said goodbye, and off I went to work right off the train, wading in the sea of frowns just like every morning. The frowns are etched in the older people’s faces like water carves out a canyon.  I fit right in that morning. I’ve read somewhere that 6% of Hungarians say they are happy, and I always joke that number seems inflated.

I also saw a guy wearing a t-shirt with a Star of David going into a trashcan, a play on this image.

I boarded a bus with a tastefully/minimalistically drawn penis and balls on the side.

Just another routine day in Kafkaland.

A nice place to visit but . . .

[1] As they say in writing school, choose not an approximate word, but the perfect word.

Audrey Kawasaki

If you’re a devoted reader of this blog, you’re undoubtedly highly intelligent, impressively learned, and therefore familiar with Jacques’ “All the World’s a Stage” speech from As You like It:

All the world’s a stage,
And all the men and women merely players;
They have their exits and their entrances,
And one man in his time plays many parts,
His acts being seven ages. At first, the infant,
Mewling and puking in the nurse’s arms.
Then the whining schoolboy, with his satchel
And shining morning face, creeping like snail
Unwillingly to school. And then the lover,
Sighing like furnace, with a woeful ballad
Made to his mistress’ eyebrow. Then a soldier,
Full of strange oaths and bearded like the pard,
Jealous in honor, sudden and quick in quarrel,
Seeking the bubble reputation
Even in the canon’s mouth. And then the justice,
In fair round belly with good capon lined,
With eyes severe and beard of formal cut,
Full of wise saws and modern instances;
And so he plays his part. The sixth age shifts
Into the lean and slippered pantaloon
With spectacles on nose and pouch on side;
His youthful hose, well saved, a world too wide
For his shrunk shank, and his big manly voice,
Turning again toward childish treble, pipes
And whistles in his sound. Last scene of all,
That ends this strange eventful history,
Is second childishness and mere oblivion,
Sans teeth, sans eyes, sans taste, sans everything

William Mulready: The Seven Ages of Man

Note, tweens and pre-sexual adolescents are missing from the above. We jump from “whining school boys” to lovers/soldiers, who seem much more like young adults than the high school seniors I teach who for Spirit Week come to school costumed as characters from video games (Mario/Luigi) or as insects (bubble bees/lightening bugs) or even as consumer items (e.g., Junior Mints). Surreal – a dozen highly intelligent adolescents arrayed with false mustaches and zombie make-up and insect wings seated around a Harkness table discussing how the limited omniscient point-of-view in Mansfield’s “Miss Brill” relates to the short story’s themes of alienation and illusion vs. reality.

It almost makes one wax nostalgic for the draft.

Paradoxically, as childishness stretches into the third decade in the West, girls are menstruating and boys ejaculating earlier and earlier.

Jennifer Linton Catholic Girls

Yet, even though humans are capable of sexual reproduction much earlier, the latest brain research proclaims that the human brain doesn’t reach maturity until 25 or so. In fact, the NY Times reports that:

JEFFREY JENSEN ARNETT, a psychology professor at Clark University in Worcester, Mass., is leading the movement to view the 20s as a distinct life stage, which he calls “emerging adulthood.” He says what is happening now is analogous to what happened a century ago, when social and economic changes helped create adolescence — a stage we take for granted but one that had to be recognized by psychologists, accepted by society and accommodated by institutions that served the young. Similar changes at the turn of the 21st century have laid the groundwork for another new stage, Arnett says, between the age of 18 and the late 20s. Among the cultural changes he points to that have led to “emerging adulthood” are the need for more education to survive in an information-based economy; fewer entry-level jobs even after all that schooling; young people feeling less rush to marry because of the general acceptance of premarital sex, cohabitation and birth control; and young women feeling less rush to have babies given their wide range of career options and their access to assisted reproductive technology if they delay pregnancy beyond their most fertile years.

So, if adulthood doesn’t really start in earnest until our late twenties, then over a third of our lives are spent in immaturity? Is this phenomenon also true in developing and third world countries? Is evolution retarding industrial countries’ citizens’ independence so that their brains can fully form while along the Steppes Mogul nomads skip emerging adulthood for the rigors of survival?

Tim Cope

Over here in sitcomland and on Nickelodeon, we’re seeing children cynically wisecracking and forever flummoxing inept adults. Worse, (at least to me) advertisers manipulate the images of babies to lip synch in bored adult voices as they shill products. Certainly, true innocence seems lost ever earlier.

At any rate, what a bountiful kingdom childhood has become, a continent of enchantment stretching from Candyland and jump rope to beer pong and bungie jumping. Kids get to boss their parents around until the “youngsters” verge on thirty yet get to enjoy the financial wherewithal those pushed-around progenitors have accumulated. Pity our poor ancestors, their playtime cut short by plagues, famines, and wars.

Take, Master Will, for example, here in his 30’s whining to young Southampton that he – the Bard of Avon – is getting fairly long in the tooth:

That time of year thou mayst in me behold
When yellow leaves, or none, or few, do hang
Upon those boughs which shake against the cold,
Bare ruin’d choirs, where late the sweet birds sang.