The other day I decided to walk from one bus stop to another instead of taking the city bus the whole way. Since the next bus stop was right next to a gas station, I popped into the gas station store for my favorite coffee to go: Latte macchiato. I drank my favorite coffee in something you could call semi-company, standing behind a small round counter-high table. Basically I was alone, with a smidgen of young guys added in a safe distance: bus drivers, building contractors, firemen, casually passing by while shopping or paying for gas. The array of their business uniforms performed an excellent...

In my previous blog I explained how a clear hallucination stopped me from driving. Yet since I am far from being a quitter, there had to be more to it. The question: ‘Why should I drive a car in the first place?’ became more and more of a rhetorical question. Here is my final list of reasons why I do not want to own my own car and why I do not want to be able to drive: – It is too expensive to own 2 cars in the same household. – It is much more ecological to use public transport. – You meet more interesting people, if you need a ride occasionally. Of course you have to know you...

The title itself shows a certain redundancy: the word ‘own’ repeats itself twice. Similarly, over the years, despite of the whole ‘women’s lib’ thing going on, I found it totally redundant to own my own car. After 4 years of trying really hard to relax behind the wheel, I gave up driving due to a clear hallucination. Let me tell you the whole true story: I was driving in the countryside. My husband was sitting in the co-driver’s seat. Suddenly out of the blue I saw a human being trying to cross the road. I panicked, stepped off the gas and started to pull the brakes. My husband...

This time I decided to simply tell a true story I witnessed and refrain from any moralizing: A group of surveyors have a field assignment. They have to measure the ground above a tunnel being built. They use all sorts of high-tech equipment I would not know about. But what I do get is the importance of the so called targets set on the terrain in question. These targets are making it possible for the surveyors to conduct the measurements. Later, at lunch time, they come to pick up the targets and to their very unpleasant surprise, they find some people touching and moving the targets. It is not the...

I was taking a walk along a river the other day and to my surprise I spotted a swan. I came closer to the river bank nice and slow in order not to scare him off. I started taking pictures of the white creature and to my even bigger surprise, the swan started to swim in my direction. He stopped, when he was close up and seemed to be enjoying being photographed. At some point I felt that enough is enough and I stopped taking photos. The swan swam away. I felt a telepathic connection with the white animal and was really disappointed, when five local dogs started chasing him, the owners being unable to...