no clever title tonight

Despite my promises to the contrary, here I am more than a week later just getting back to writing again.

Thanks to another packed week of work—it’s past midnight and I only just finished for the night—I’ve managed to remain too preoccupied to get to the computer for a few minutes.

We lost our game last weekend 38-31 at home against Amsterdam. We’re 1-2-1, good for fourth place (out of six) right now. Next week, we play in the first-ever Monday game in NFL Europe.

That meant players had a few days off this weekend. I didn’t have time off, but I still took some. I spend 8-10 hours a day locked in my hotel room writing, so I have to get out every now and again. At any rate, I paid dearly for my time off with a long day yesterday and a late night tonight.

On Sunday, I visited Potsdam, which is on the southwest side of the city. Throughout the town, there are a lot of large, ornate palaces. They were nearly all built in the Rococo period and are thus rather gaudy. And pastel.

Quick aside – Every time I hear a reference the Rococo period, I inevitably think of Rocky Rococo’s, a pizza place in Waterloo, Iowa, where I grew up. Yum. I spent several Intro to Fine Arts classes longing for a good pizza pie. The place was one of my dad’s favorites, if I recall correctly. It closed when I was pretty young, though, so I may be making that part up.

Anyways, the main attraction of Potsdam is the Sanssouci Palace, which was pretty impressive. They only offered guided tours in German, so I had to pass on that. I did, however, take the unguided tour of the New Palace. It had marble floors in some rooms, wood patterned floors in others, that were equally impressive. In one room, the entire ceiling and walls were covered in sea shells. The time spent decorating the room had to have been immense.

Everything around the area I visited was connected by long dirt paths, so I got a nice walk in. Wherever various paths converged, a wide circle opened with 8-12 sculptures on the perimeter. They were some of the oddest sculptures I’ve seen. The sculptures and busts incorporated into the architecture throughout Potsdam rivaled Oxford for sheer weirdness. I have some pictures, but won’t take the time to post them all. If you’d like to see them, just email me.

Today, the team took a trip to Sachsenhausen, which was a concentration camp from 1936-45. They now have a museum and walking tour on the site. I picked up my map to find stops labeled “Execution Trench,” “Site of the Gallows” and “Site of the First Crematorium.” That was when I knew the whole experience would be just a little overwhelming.

At one point, we walked past a large rectangular gravel patch as the hand-held audio tour explained that a garage used to stand there. Only the garage wasn’t used for cars, but for over 10,000 executions.

I could only listen to about a quarter of the tour because of information overload, not to mention a little bit of emotional overload. The whole experience was somewhat surreal. I thought about complaining that I was cold (I was), but it certainly didn’t feel right.

Like I said, work has been non-stop right now, so I’ve been feeling a bit stressed out. Fortunately, I had a very good talk with one of the players about the whole Sachsenhausen experience tonight. It was really helpful to just try to process what we saw. Real conversation is my key to sanity right now, I think, as I live in what feels like a rather fake universe.

Sometimes, I feel like I only get to talk to the players and coaches on the record or for work-related stuff, so it was a treat just to have a real conversation for once. If you click on my articles link sometime Wednesday, you can read some of his on-the-record thoughts on the day.

At any rate, the time is creeping slowly closer to 1 a.m. and breakfast starts at 6:30. Anyone who knows me well (or has been out late with me) knows that I’m a sucker for sleep and I’m not above complaining incessantly about being tired, so I must catch a few Zs before I render myself entirely useless and/or unbearable for tomorrow.