Current Post On Trae’s Blog:
My grandmother died last night. This wasn't a shock or a surprise. Her health has been on the decline, and she's been in hospice for the last month. She lived a long life, and in her final days she was surrounded by her three adult children.
My grandma was a kind woman. She wasn't perfect, but I always felt loved in her presence. She was a retired kindergarten teacher, and was still working when I was a kid. I have so many happy memories sitting at her kitchen table, and I'm going to carry those with me for the rest of my life. She was also proof that anyone who claims that you get more conservative as you get older is full of shit, because she certainly didn't.
I think it's interesting how the body processes grief sometimes. I don't know that I'll cry, but over the past month, knowing this was coming, I've felt a tension in my gut. Now that she's passed, instead of relief that tension is replaced by a sense of emptiness. That something is missing that should still be there. Something has been taken away, and I feel it.
Of course, as I wrote that, I immediately started crying... so I guess my body processes grief in pretty ordinary ways too.
I wanted to come up with something profound linking this to Beltane, which we sit in the middle of right now, but it just seemed hackneyed. Like I was trying to dig out some greater significance when the truth is death comes whenever it wants. The only predictable thing about it is that it's the end of all of our journeys. I hope that when I pass I'm so lucky to have lived such a long life with people that I love around me in my final days.
For the record, I will be fine. I just needed to get these words out while they were still in my head. I don't have some rousing conclusion or deep insight to tack on here at the end, just that gut feeling that something is missing.
Because it is.
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Wisconsin has a rich German heritage to it hence why it has a rich beer brewing industry. Maybe they are visiting relatives or something and they are on their back to Chicago O Hare or something.
Oh and according to google translate the guy said “you can not just go harass foreign in gas stations. we are not belgium.”
I think Google Translate may have been used to generate the dialogue to begin with. It’s the German equivalent of Engrish.
IT’S ALMOST AS IF I DON’T SPEAK GERMAN.
*Gasp!* Das kann nicht wahr seihen!
That’s not what Google translate outputs if you put it in as two sentences… and have the capitalization right (which admittedly doesn’t come through in the all-caps font I use).
If you feel like fixing the German, it should be something like, “Du kannst nicht einfach Fremde in Tankstellen belästigen!”
(As it is, the strip is really weird: why would these people talk to each other in broken German? Unless neither of them is actually German, but that’s the only language they both kinda know?…)