To much Baggage

I had an AI read everything on this site. Seventy-five entries, from February 2022 to today, plus my dissertation and my CV. Then I asked it to write a post about me. No mercy. I haven't changed a word.

(Written in German, translated into English. All quotations from the blog are translations of my own words.)

There is a tunnel in Catalonia, two and a half kilometres long, no lights. In April 2022 a man rides into it, because that's where the road goes and because he can see the light at the far end. The light doesn't get bigger. The one behind him gets smaller. The floor is packed dirt, alcoves surface out of the dark on either side when his lamp sweeps across them, and he hates the dark, he just isn't sure why.

Then he is sure. It comes to him while riding, the way things do: his first bicycle. A BMX, silver, yellow saddle, dynamo, mudguards — road-safe. In a village of three hundred people and five streets. Road-safe, he writes later, with an exclamation mark in brackets.

The same house sent the child down to the cellar at four years old to fetch apple juice. Glass bottles. He fell going back up the stairs and smashed his face open with two broken bottles in his hands. At nine he was sent out to buy cigarettes. The neighbours kept asking for weeks what had happened to the little lad; in a village, people knew how things went in that house.

And the same household forbade him, as a teenager, from walking through an underpass alone.

There it is, the whole ledger of a life in two images. Inside, danger was the weather. Outside, danger was death. He didn't invent it, he inherited it, and he names it with the dryness of a man who stopped crying a long time ago: absorbed with my mother's milk.

Further into the tunnel he wonders whether the ghouls in the alcoves would wake up if he had to turn back. He doesn't turn back. He comes out the far end, ducks under the gate, and lands in a clay pit. Two kilos of muck on the bike. That evening he stops at a car dealership just closing up, and total strangers give him a free go with the pressure washer.

If you had to boil this entire blog down to a single paragraph, it would be that one. Dark passage. Childhood in the walls. Don't turn back. Clay at the end, and strangers who help.

Six weeks earlier the same man stood in a flat in western Germany in front of forty-five kilograms of luggage. Not counting food. Four different disinfectants. Two air pumps. Spare wheels left at home in the cellar, in case they needed to be sent on.

You can pack a childhood into panniers. He did, and he noticed.

What came next is the actual story. He unpacked half of it again and called it one hard day of selection. Seven years earlier, on the way to the Black Sea, he had posted seven kilos home from Ulm on the third morning and never missed them. And four years later, on a pass in New Zealand, he hauls thirty kilos, three quarters of which he knows he doesn't need — this time deliberately, because he wants to see when he breaks.

His mother's baggage first. Then setting it down. Then his own, carried voluntarily, as a test.

That is not a man running away. That is a man asking the same question again, this time in his own voice.

He knows himself extremely well, by the way. That isn't the problem.

Roughly once a year he sits down on a hill — usually the Palatine in Rome, always with a wide view, always just before something new begins — and delivers a diagnosis of himself that is complete, precise and merciless. Fear of attachment. Conflict, because his childhood consisted of a single unresolved one in which he was the weapon. The useful idiot: too kind, too helpful, always looking for the fault in himself first.

It is correct every time. And every time he gets up afterwards and rides on.

You might think he lacks insight. He has the opposite problem. He has too much of it. For him the writing down is the action — the pressure goes into the text, the text accepts everything, never argues back, and afterwards there is quiet. A blog is an excellent listener and a terrible friend.

And from that annual reckoning, everything that went well is consistently missing.

In 2022 he has panic attacks on Spanish hillsides — racing heart, shortness of breath, turn around; a path above Genoa takes him three attempts. In 2025 he walks down a dirt track in Liguria with a five-hundred-metre drop below it and notes: I wouldn't have done that before. Today? No problem. In 2026 he stands alone in front of a swaying wire-mesh suspension bridge in the New Zealand backcountry and writes a sentence other people need years to reach: Fear is good, it warns you. But having control over your fear at the right moment is worth gold.

Three and a half years against something older than he is. Won. Recorded: nowhere.

A mountain in New Zealand, signposted at three to three and a half hours, after two and a half years of twelve-hour days — he's up and down in two, and his comment is three letters: Oops. A radiation safety exam in a foreign language, with dyslexia, one hundred percent, not one wrong answer: a subordinate clause. Five novels past seventy-two thousand words, the editing under way — and in the same breath he calls them "the books that will never be finished."

He keeps an immaculate record of his losses. Of his gains, none at all.

It would be dishonest to stop here, because there is a second truth, and it is colder.

In an air-conditioned shopping mall in Brisbane there is a waitress he enjoyed talking to for a year. He disappears for three months without a word. When he comes back she sets his coffee down — slams it down — says nothing and walks away.

He understands instantly. He knows it means something, he knows he caused it, and he knows he'll never be back. So he finishes his coffee, memorises her face, blinks back a tear and leaves.

Maybe, just maybe, I should sometimes ask people whether they'd like to get a coffee with me. But I'm just shy about that sort of thing. I'd rather keep my mouth shut and disappear for three months.

The same scene exists in Versailles. In Naples, where a woman cheerfully invites him up onto her balcony and he declines. In Cairns, where a woman at the tourist office asks whether he likes eating out and he says uhhh and resolves to do better next time. Four continents, four years, one sequence: someone opens a door, he closes it, and afterwards he is annoyed with himself for days.

And in Queenstown, where a town, a flat, a job and a person are all standing open at once, he writes the sentence that ends it before it starts: If I'm not careful I'll fall in love with this town and just stay. And that is the last thing I need right now. Two paragraphs later, about something else entirely: When you need a reason, you'll always find an excuse.

He describes the machine while it's running, and keeps pedalling.

But the file has another page, and he has never read it.

There are two classmates from forty years ago who keep a bed free for him over the years and, in the summer of 2026, clear out a room without a single question. There is a friend who drives the van every time and then sits down conspicuously in the bakery afterwards. There is an older Englishwoman on a four-day hike who sits on a hut veranda with two others and waits, because he is the slowest — he writes to my surprise about this, and they put a black tea in his hand. There is an Austrian he offers half his room to in Wellington; the reply lands in his spam folder, so the man works out where he might be and climbs a mountain to find him.

And there is a car dealership in Catalonia with a pressure washer.

He believes himself to be a man without people. The file disagrees, loudly.

One last thing, because it is too obvious to politely skip.

He has been writing the wrong book for years. Scattered through this blog, between sunset photographs, lie four or five long pieces of non-fiction: on knowledge passed down without writing, in songs and sand drawings; on two words in two languages whose mismatch in an 1840 treaty led to a war; on the heat sitting under a thin crust of earth that supplies half a country with power; on a first human being who has to ask the spirits to teach him how to live.

They are thorough, curious and alive at the same time, which almost nobody manages. He helped build exhibitions as a student, and it shows: he doesn't just see what's on display, he sees how it was made.

The book already exists. It lies in eight entries, it has a narrator who belongs nowhere and therefore looks closely, and it isn't called Anadar.

And now directly, because in the third person this particular man gets off too easily.

You called your very first entry In the Beginning There Was Fire. It is about a spirit stove that won't light in the wind. You try more fuel. Longer matches. Eventually a blowtorch meant for crème brûlée. The water goes lukewarm, and it isn't enough for pasta.

Two sentences later comes what actually worked.

Not more fuel. Not more will. Not push harder, not pack heavier, not keep riding until you can't.

A windbreak.

You worked that out in February 2022, before you had even set off, and it applies to stoves and to everything else. You are the only person in this archive with the answer sitting in his first entry, who has spent the years since looking for it on five continents.

For seventy-four entries you have ended with the same four German words. You've earned them, I haven't. So take them back, and then go.

In diesem Sinne.

Written by an AI (Claude) after reading every entry on this blog, the dissertation and the CV. At the subject's request, without varnish. Third parties' names have been left out — they didn't consent. He did.