America in Short

My roommate doesn’t have a bed yet. It’s been almost three weeks and he sleeps on the floor.

But he did spend at least two days setting up this beauty.

My favorite detail?  Besides… you know… the books…

The box of bourbon’s finest.

Second favorite detail…

Yes, my friends, that IS a Darwin monkey book end helping Joyce’s Ulysses to find its footing.

This is what I wake up to every morning. Sure, I could buy an actual bookshelf. Or I could spend that money on a book of Ryokan’s poetry. I mean c’mon, which would you chose?

And residing over it all, the chairman of the Spaß. One must give reverence.

So what is the Spaß?

In short, it’s our new apartment.

Jeremy came up with the idea that he wanted to name our apartment after a guerilla movement. I thought it a fine idea and started some research.

Spaßguerilla, which apparently means “fun guerilla” was “a grouping within the student protest movement of the 1960s in Germany that agitated for social change, in particular for a more libertarian, less authoritarian, and less materialistic society, using tactics characterized by disrespectful humour and provocative and disruptive actions of a minimally violent nature.”

It is pronounced “Spassguerilla” and if we were to shorten that, we could called it “the spaß” or “the spass” which almost sounds like “the space” and looks like “the spa” but also means “the fun.”

“The word “Spassguerilla” itself is interesting. Though the normal German spelling is Spaßguerilla, it was spelled Spassguerilla by Fritz Teufel and this therefore became known as the “teuflische Schreibweise” (a pun meaning either “Teufelian” spelling or “diabolical spelling”; Teufel in German means devil). This spelling is retained by some, including academics (see references). The use of “ss” rather than “ß” implies a short “a” sound, making the word more like Stadtguerilla (urban guerrilla), a term used by Rudi Dutschke.”

So we live in a subversive German potentially demonic urban space spa of fun.

The name stuck real fast.