Losing my religion

Just finished my first week of work. I'm a little drunk and a lot tired. Spent the evening with all the ladies from the office. Collectively we speak German, Swedish, Portuguese, Spanish, English, Hindi, French, Japanese and a Zambian language that I do not know (there are 85 languages spoken in Zambia...). We ate a beautiful Portuguese meal and drank caipirinhas and what I can say about all that language exchange is that puns of a sexual nature work across language barriers. We laughed a lot.

I needed it. After all, under the banner of the German bureaucracy and in the eyes of God, I denounced religion to save 30 euro/month.

It started on Wednesday. I met up with my good friend Tony Kelly (oh some of you know him as Tony-no-eyes) at the Hauptbahnhof in Bonn (the central train station) sweaty and listless after a mad dash home from work to grab a change of clothes for a quick trip to Dusseldorf. We had tickets for a concert that I had assumed included a German brass band playing some kind of jazzy samba music. They were called LaBrassBanda. We met my good friend Kate (tony's better half) at the Zakk: Zentrum for Aktion, kultur, and kommunikation (I f#*ing love the use of 'k' in this language) just before the band got underway. In short time I had a weitzen (wheat beer from D'Dorf) in hand and was staring out a crowd of people far too large for any stickler fire inspector to allow in such a small space. My samba-jazz brass band stepped on stage in lederhosen and t-shirts and sported a trombone, a tiny wee trumpet, and a huge tuba. The brass section was followed by a bass guitar and a drummer. The crowd was worked in a decidely un-jazzy frenzy and I started to reconsider what I was about to experience. Needless to say, by the end of the night I was a sweaty mess at the front of the stage head banging and failing my drunken limbs to a ska-reggae-bavarian fusion covering sweet hits from the 90s like "Rhythm is a Dancer"... for something near and dear, check out http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=MpYKD75zlkY&feature=related.

The train I needed to take was at 6:50am the following morning so naturally Tony, Kate and I stayed up drinking whiskey until 2 am. I set three alarms for 6 am. When I awoke I found kate, future patron saint of breakfasts (once I file the paperwork with the Pope), making french toast in the kitchen. This was the fuel I needed to get back to Bonn, 1 tram and an hour-long train away, in time for my 8:50am appointment at the Stadthaus (city hall) to get registered in this country. I realized once I boarded the train that I was still drunk; which was not a promising epiphany early on a Thursday morning. When I got home I realized that my passport was at work. 2 more trains later I had my passport and was on my way to my appointment. one more train later I was totally lost south of the city. two trains later I was back where I started. One train later I was an hour late to meet the colleague who had graciously offered to join me at city hall and translate my paperwork. She was not there. This was when things got metaphysical. I did my registration anyway. They asked if I was protestant or catholic... and I went protestant cause my lingering inebriation had me thinking that a harder work ethic was preferable to drowning in guilt. I didn't know i could tell them I was a nihilist or a dinosaur or a movementarian...

2 more trains later I got back to work and fought the urge to sleep at my desk. Who does that in their first week of work? 15 minutes later I awoke to find the head of administration in my office. She asked me if I had done my registration. check. She asked me if i had a tax card. no idea what that was. She asked me if I had told them i had no religion. blank again.

It seems that if you claim a religion in Germany, they tax you a tithe for that church and I surreptitiously agreed to give the protestant faith 30 of my hard earned euros per month for cathedral upkeep and general soul-saving. I had to right this wrong. The head of admin told me it may be too late, but I went back to the stadthaus the next morning to lose my newly claimed religion.

When I got there i waited for an hour to speak to someone and then the woman at the counter didn't speak English. She found someone to give a rough translation. The message was basically that I could reverse my religious commitments (in the sober light of Friday) but they would need it writing. Thus, on Friday, August 6th, 2010, at 9:15am in Bonn, Germany, in a pallid and dimly-lit cubicle, at the behest of the German Bureacracy, I renounced, in writing, my freshly claimed religious fervor with the words "I have no religion".

Writing such a statement then signing, dating and surrendering it on a piece of A4 paper to a national government officer is unnerving. The last verse of "American Pie" shot through my head (satan laughing with delight the day the music died) and I felt I had upset the tapestry of non-committal, middle-class religious neutrality that I never knew I had fostered so deeply. So I am embracing my new nihilism as a inevitable part of my German experience. The act of denouncing God just to get a meager tax break is perhaps one of my most profound moments of capitalistic realism- I just wish I'd had the pictorial shorthand of advertising to give the statement real punch.