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Jan 2018
You ever notice how it's hard to appreciate giant bronze statues when you're hungry?
I rumble

an empty stomach
I need to be filled and a thousand dollar plane ticket leads to an attempt to do that

It gets blasΓ© after awhile

"Oh, you're church doesn't have gold mosaic ceilings? What is this trash?"

I'm surrounded, guns drawn
by an endless litany of priceless art and artifacts

but

I find more inspiration in the teen trying to herd pigeons than the golden horses on the Venice balcony
more from the father trying to teach his baby daughter that cigarette butts aren't a thing to be picked off the ground
(there are some conversations you don't need to speak the same language to understand)
than the ancient cannons in the Salzburg castle wall
the cannons used in some ancient battle that truly represented the blah blah blah
A long time ago men died here, killed each other, defending their home so that years later privileged ***** like me could stand around it and take pictures and not give a ****. All for the low low price of 10 €.
If you stand very still you can feel the ground shake underneath you
the collective drone of the tourists rumbling
Mouths watering on feed me your culture
I step into a building older than my country. In the bottom is an H&M

I fill myself in the simple message poured out of a spray can on a Munich subway wall
I β™₯ U

or perhaps, what filled me the most
Thanksgiving dinner
was some graffiti scrawled in shaky hand at the base of a statue in Barcelona.
The graffiti was in French

"Je suis malade"
I am sick
Written by
Mike Hentges  26/Cisgender Male/Minneapolis
(26/Cisgender Male/Minneapolis)   
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