Harry´s Blog

According to “Profil(e)”Austria is in the lead.
You’re Number One on the European Tally of Smokers.
Austria, you may be runner-up to Hungary on Suicide,
but you’re two up on Hungary in Smoking.

Harry Congratulates the Champion!

from The Grey Haze/Der blaue Dunst

There are thousands, millions, billions of chimneys
polluting the atmosphere of the world
that are producing nothing but inane expressions on faces.

The Man in the Windbreaker
The man in the Windbreaker became the symbol for the new activity. The cult poster showed James Dean walking through a Broadway puddle on the Boulevard of Broken Wind. The hit tunes were Wind is in the Air; All You Need Is Wind; I Can’t Give You Anything but Wind, Baby and Wind is Sweeping the Country. The Anthem became Today the Nation, Tomorrow the World. Men insisted that breaking was masculine and was part of the tough guy image. But women, not to be outdone, made it their own. Feminists declared that breaking represented liberation. Women not only smoke at kaffee klatsches but did is openly on the streets.

The new craze displaced chain-smoking, gum-chewing and -snapping as well as screeching walkman headphones. It simply became the thing to do. Intellectuals would look at you serenely and dreamily as they broke. It seemed to inspire high flights into the cerebral stratosphere. Workers broke on the job, claiming that it improved their speed and efficiency. In restaurants, breakers would come to sit at your table and break without asking, as if it were the most natural thing in the world to do (which it was). Some would even go as far as to break in your face.

Attempts at segregation failed. Breaking was not addictive and it did not cause cancer. Quite on the contrary, it was healthy and invigorating. The best a non-breaker could do was to grin and bear it. Many couldn’t stand standing or sitting on the sidelines and broke down to break wind with the windbreakers. That way breaking was less noticeable.

The Holy Roman Mother got into the act. “The family that breaks together, stays together,” was the way they put it. And the Lefties, as was to be expected, painted breaking Red. “Windbreakers of the world unite, you have nothing to lose but your wind,” became their motto. Windbreaking took hold of the nation and blasted over every border. It spread to the four corners of the world like wildfire. There was no nook or cranny safe from it.

There was nothing left to do but break out of the closet and break wind.

- Herbert Kuhner