Ambush Predator

I've been back from my gallivanting Helvetian sojourn amongst Alps and all of the goats implied therein long enough that some of the immediacy has begun to fade. I'm always surprised by the speed at which our experiences transition from "a thing I just did" to "a thing that happened." I really shouldn't be as, a long time ago now, I opted into the cruelest and most existential method of experiencing that kind of dis-immediafying effect by opting to have kids. Three of them. There's really nothing more simultaneously cruel and delicious in the human experience than the day you can't remember what it felt like to hold your children in your arms because now they weigh as much as a Great Dane or you can't remember what their pre-pubescent squeak voices sound like because those memories are all narrated by these three bearded James Earl Jones-sounding motherfuckers who body-snatched my babies.

When you first get back, everyone wants to ask: how was it? What did you see? And you struggle to remember because it's all still kind of a blur of color and light, not quite solidified into something as maybe factually dubious but narratively sound as a memory. It takes a while to decide (subconsciously mostly, but not always) what becomes a tellable story and the unworthy chaff left behind. The worst situation is being trapped in a conversation with someone who can't make those critical distinctions and wants to tell you about all the things that happened, usually about an experience you would never have been curious about in the first place. That's a long elevator ride. All you can do is feel pre-emptive sympathy for the poor bastard down the line who is going to have to hear this dude's story about this elevator ride.

The people at work asked the polite questions. The kids were forced to sit through the slide show (it's amazing what you can do with an iPhone and a smart TV). The family members made it through the phone calls. Now there's just me and my 900 photos, edging our way into that most dangerous of zones: the Solicitous Traveler.

That sounds a little more salacious than intended, like a voice-dubbed mid-1990s made-for-Showtime late-night movie about Swedes boning on trains. It's not that (I'm hardly Scandinavian at all, last I heard from my Ancestry-dot-com DNA update), it's just that I can feel myself on the hair trigger of being ready to fire off a Switzerland story at the slightest prompting, ranging from an overlapping direct reference to maybe just a single breath of pause in a conversation I'm near but maybe not even actively a part of yet. "Yes, this historic drought in California is dangerous and possibly catastrophic, but you know where they have plenty of water? Lucerne. It's on a lake, you see..." and then I can launch into my 45 minute chunk about the public water fountains with free drinking water all over Switzerland. By the end you're standing there by yourself with whatever poor bastard sits in that cubicle and can't easily leave without feigning dysentery, which ironically you wouldn't get from the Swiss public drinking fountains because of how clean the water is!

I realize in the course of describing the situation I accidentally actually did the thing and I apologize. You see how serious this is. But I want you to know I'm actively working on it. I probably would work less hard at it if I knew more people and could afford to burn some casual acquaintances off, but alas, my friendship circle comes pre-curated. The people who really know you are going to be more indulgent, sure, but only up to a point. Or several points, like the peaks of Eiger, Monch and Jungfrau in the Berner Oberland region. I went to the highest rail station in Europe there! And I walked on a glacier. In July!

See? It's bad. If you're interested though, seriously, I legit have 900 photos I could share, really. Shoot me a DM, I have at least 60 pictures of rösti alone.