The Paris, London, Rome Trifecta: A Tragedy in Two Parts

Throughout the historical record, there are countless stories of great men who reached great heights only to come crashing down to the cold hard Earth below. Dozens, if not hundreds, of examples permeate the pages of time of once seemingly brilliant philosophers, artists, or warriors who displayed hints of genius, only to later universally disappoint or forever stain their name with a fall from grace or another embarrassing crack in their persona that all but erased the shine of their earlier once-thought-great contributions. This pattern existed in antiquity and indeed it exists to this day.

Herbert Spencer was once a well-respected philosopher who in fact coined the expression "survival of the fittest" after reading On the Origin of Species (you won't find that phrase in Darwin's manuscript!). He was even once nominated for the Nobel Prize for literature. Sadly for his legacy, but rightly so, he is now entirely discredited and disgraced due primarily to his later delusional writings around, and promotion of, his theory of Social Darwinism: that some races are superior to others, and therefore rightly have more power in human society.

Napoleon was once (and, apparently, in some circles still is) hailed as a military tactical genius as he rose to become the Emperor of France and grew the French Empire as it spread across much of the European mainland and beyond. Later, however, he led perplexing and arguably self-sabotaging military campaigns including the disastrous invasion of Russia, all leading eventually to his infamous defeat at Waterloo.

In more modern times, A. Duritz, in the early times of the heydays of the 1990s, gave us moving introspective song lyrics including the gems "And the feeling that it's all a lot of oysters, but no pearls" and "In between the moon and you, the angels get a better view of the crumbling difference between wrong and right". These, presumably following some disastrous downfall in Mr. Duritz's life, leading to a deeply felt and clearly horribly prevalent mental decline, rapidly devolved over the years, culminating in the disastrous and frankly embarrassing:

American girls, oh American girls

American girls, oh oh oh oh

American girls, oh American girls

American girls, oh oh oh oh

Mr. Duritz's cringe-inducing public crumbling of his character and any respect he might once have held has been further evidenced by his rambling, incoherent, and dare I say shameful soliloquies expounded from somewhere deep within his poisoned soul, that he punishes those who are still foolish enough to attend his shows with between songs as he laments his lack of a female partner after all these years of being a rock and roll star.

Nevertheless! Forget not the great debate of art vs. artist. Despite his later failings, did Napoleon's original campaigns not exhibit greatness? We can continue to appreciate these tactical decisions and indeed their genius, while separating them from the broken man that Napoleon eventually became. One might even go so far as to say that we can still enjoy a Woody Allen movie solely based on the intrinsic contents of the movie itself, and divorce it from the fact that just maybe the creator of that piece of art later turned out to be a pedophilic deranged sexual predator who married his former partner's adopted child.

Given all of the above, I think it's fair to say that we can still find and then use the strength that still exists in lyrics of old from A. Duritz, including when he sang:

Don’t waste your life

Yeah I don’t wanna waste my life

You don’t wanna waste your life

I don’t wanna waste my life

I have been to Paris and I have

Been to Rome

And I have gone to London

And I am, all alone

And I think it's even more fair to say that it's a very sensible thing to do to engineer a very complex change in your life so that you can live out a 14-second (probably misconstrued) idea from a song from the 1990's even though the singer of said song has since been disgraced.

✨

It was a hot day in August. The Pemulis Family was enjoying a long vacation in their ancestral Canadian homeland when Pemulis was offered a new job. This was it! His chance to live out the ending of the song A Murder of One. All he had to do was accept the job, give notice at his current job, leave a week in between the jobs free, plan a trip to Rome for that intervening week, have his mother-in-law fly across the ocean to take care of the children, and then step one would be complete. His new job would provide him the funds to, several weeks later, travel to Paris by train and thereby complete step two. His plan was almost too genius because if all went perfectly according to plan, the new company would hold a Christmas party in London but a few days after his return from Paris upon which they would fly him to said party and the plan would be nearly complete. It's almost too easy. Now, being all alone is not something that Pemulis wanted for the long term, but he had taken on this project and needed to find a way to complete the plan even if it was just temporarily. One day business and military planners will write books about this because it was just all too brilliant. He would be sure that this entire chain of events would take place right as a new Covid wave was rising. The infection would have to take place following all the travel to not put any of steps 1, 2, or 3 at risk. But upon return, infected but alive, the need to self-isolate would take care of everything including its temporary nature. And thus, all alone. I bow before you and say now: Mission Accomplished.

On a cold, dark night on the Spanish stairs

While there are few cold nights in Rome -- especially at the end of September -- and I believe it's the Spanish steps rather than stairs, Bob's right on the money when he says that ancient footprints are everywhere. Thanks to Mrs. Joelle flying in on the AC123, Joelle and Pemulis were recently able to add to those footprints when they spent five days and four glorious nights in the City of Seven Hills (you might know it as the Eternal City) during the first official days of autumn in this year AD 2023.

With Helga and Heinrich left behind, the original stars of the blog were able to try to recharge after nearly eight years of whatever the opposite of childless vacations are ("child vacations"? anti-paradise?). We arrived on a warm (they were all warm) evening and checked into our colosseum-adjacent hotel before rushing out to our first of many delicious meals. The negronis and the red wine flowed along with cacio e pepe, carbonara, cicoria, and other Roman delights. After dinner we took advantage of the much less peopled streets and took in a tiny portion of the unlimited ancient sights of the city.

We of course had cappuccinos with sticky sweet pastries for breakfast every morning, we walked on the Spanish steps both during the day and on a dark night (but it was never cold), we walked all around the colosseum, we ran along the Tiber and past the Castel Sant'Angelo, we visited the German cemetery at the Vatican that only citizens of the former Holy Roman Empire may visit (but don't tell anyone because we're of course not really Germans... but we managed to get past the Swiss Guards with only our cunning to guide us), we got a guided tour of the Domus Aurea which was actually really quite amazing and I would highly recommend it. It's crazy that it -- like most everything else around those parts -- is 2000 years old and the art on the walls is that old too.

It was sunny every single day, the food and wine were delicious, the prices are incredible especially in comparison to Munich/Germany, the people are actually nice (especially in comparison to Munich/Germany), and I didn't think about work once (probably since I was "between jobs" at the time as they say). You know, I think maybe we should move there...

Sayonara

Five hundred twenty five thousand six hundred minutes. Sorry. I mean two million six hundred twenty eight thousand minutes. Five years. That's how much time I gave to my soon-to-be ex employer in blood, sweat, and tears (mainly tears actually). And actually actually, you have to take off the evenings, weekends, weeks of vacation, recharge days (and weeks), sick days, times when I was sitting at my computer but not doing anything anywhere close to working, team fun event days, lunches, etc. and I think that then the true number is somewhere closer to around 1000 minutes or so. And what did I get in return? Well, I did get to go to California a couple of times. [As an aside, even I have to admit that a lot of the content on this here blog is kind of missable at best and cringe at worst but I just re-read that California Redux post probably for the first time since I wrote it and personally I don't think it's even close to half bad.] Other things that this friendly Silicon Valley tech corporation that has never made a profit in its life gave me are stocks that have lost more than 80% of their value (I did manage to sell many of them though), a drawer full of branded t-shirts (that I wear regularly), and a healthy dose of wisdom from the school of hard knocks. I also now know how it feels to be on your own, with no direction home, like a complete unknown. So there is that.

But it all comes to an end in just a few short weeks. And on September 30th I will finally say "Sayonara". The new gig (after a short recharge trip to Rome) will start immediately afterwards and I'm hoping -- I guess obviously -- that it doesn't kill me. But hope is a dangerous thing for someone like me to have. The new company -- which shall remain nameless for now (and no I'm unfortunately not starting my own "start up" yet because getting rich is so 90's) -- has two main hubs. One of which is located in Canada's largest city and the other is (I believe) next to MI6. Crazy that after all this time Pemulis would join a Canadian company but (for now anyways) still remain in Germania. The latter of the hubs, the Londres one I mean, is one where I imagine I may be spending some of my time over the next several months. That should be fun and exciting for me because I really like rain, baked beans, complaining, being cold, being miserable, and non-rhotic pronunciation. What about you guv'nuh?

Chiemgau Trail Run 2023

Today is Tuesday, August 29th, 2023. A relatively cold, rainy day in Munich which follows two weeks of extreme heat. It has been a moment since GWMD has had an update but it was not due to lack of trying. When I opened this particular "edit" window there was already a title: "Chiemgau Trail Run 2023", and there were four opening words that had already been completed: "Four weeks ago already". Doing some detective work along with some simple math shows that, since the Chiemgau Trail Run 2023 took place on Saturday, May 6th, it was somewhere around June 3rd that I last tried (in vain) to keep this particular corner of the Internet up to date. But, nearly three months later, we will try again.

It was nearly 4 months ago now that I participated in the Chiemgau Trail Run Marathon distance -- the "classic" as they call it: Der Klassiker beim Chiemgau Trail Run – die 42 km Distanz. The 42 km distance includes 2560 metres of climbing which, for those who are not so well versed in the sport of trail running, is a lot. I don't have too much to say about it because somehow over the intervening four months I've forgotten most of the details. I do remember, however, that I (as usual) had been suffering from some sort of pain / ailment that necessitated cutting back on training and visiting the neighbourhood physiotherapist and I remember thinking that since I wasn't really properly trained that my main goal would be to beat the cut off time. The cut off time was 10 hours and I essentially annihilated that goal by running 7 hours and 54 minutes. It's good to have modest goals I guess.

Another thing I remember is that it was a lot of fun. Somehow not trying to go as fast as possible (just trying to stay alive in other words) and knowing that you just have to beat some fairly easily met cutoff time can be quite relaxing, low stress, and fun. One cool thing is that they took some nice pictures. And since I don't have so much to say I'll let those pictures do the talking for me. Enjoy!

I think I might even do it again next year.

Springtime in Paris

There was a time, many years ago, when Paris was a representation in Pemulis's mind of something kind of like freedom or an ideal that was very much aligned with the traditional touristic view of Paris which is at the root of things like Pari shōkōgun (written in the Japanese transliteration because it has allegedly historically mostly affected Japanese tourists manifesting as a sense of strong disappointment when visiting the city, where the feeling was that things weren't quite what they expected and these feelings of disappointment are so strong that, supposedly, those struck by the syndrome experience such symptoms as hallucinations and disorientation and even losing consciousness) and the sadly-entertaining-to-me depictions found in Emily in Paris. Despite being basically as poor as dirt at the time, counting the days till my next pay while jumping the Metro turnstiles, eating only pasta and free mergeuz-frites-salade from my buddies at the kebab shop (probably living no better than George Orwell did during his famous sojourn in the city), this feeling was likely reinforced as the first place that Pemulis lived away from home and then again in subsequent visits staying in nice parts of town, at the right times of the year, with good people, doing fun things, and cetera.

But apparently Paris, surprisingly, is not infallible. Now, good and bad, I may have defined these terms quite clear, no doubt, somehow. Our most recent visit was not at all bad. We had many really nice moments as a family and also at other times when we weren't together. Our trip to the tropical aquarium was really nice as was the dinner us four shared on our last night at a small French restaurant near Montmartre. The Sunday was sunny, about 20 degrees, the cherry blossoms were in bloom, and we ate a nice, quiet lunch in the 3e arrondissement after a very touristy but quite enjoyable boat ride hitting the top sites along the Seine. Joelle ran a good chunk (more than 30 km) of the Paris Marathon route one morning largely before the rest of us had even gotten out of bed, and Helga, despite not getting the colour of Eiffel Tower keychain that she really wanted, I think in the end, while she didn't show it so much, enjoyed our walk up the famous tower and the views that it provided. I had some nice, quiet (emphasis!) visits with up and coming French watchmaking companies (there are many in Paris) and had some interesting conversations with the people behind them.

Something that wasn't quite as nice was the half day (or perhaps more) that I spent finding a paediatrician, taking Heinrich (and paying!) to the doctor, then taking him further north and east to the laboratory that had the right equipment to perform the test he needed, into the absolute worst part of Paris where we witnessed (literally) growing men fighting in the street and one unfortunate soul sitting on the steps of the entrance to the metro smoking a crack pipe. Bienvenue à Paris! The loud dance music that played well into the early morning hours on several nights leading to sleepless nights was not a highlight of the trip for me. Nor was the kids' difficult ummm adaptation to learning how to behave properly (or at least not terribly) while going to bed, walking anywhere, going for meals, etc.

So lies that life is black and white faded far from the foreground on this trip. It was not perfect but it was not terrible either. As I said, we had some really nice moments; but we also had some trying ones. I hope everyone can take with them those good ones and that the bad ones will also fade. But next time I go to Paris, I'll just take Joelle :D

Tour Eiffel!

Aquarium Tropical

Horlogerie française

Touristy Boatride

Sunny Lunch in the 3e

Tasty dinner on the last night