Two years ago I visited the practice of famous psychiatrist Marie Meier-Walden to learn her self-hypnosis technique in a crash course. There I met Torben. He had a diagnosted Flow of Speech-syndrom that in some aspects perfectly complements a joyful Asperger type like me. Rarely tedious, a bit nerdy but mostly entertaining, Torben talks a lot.
Sometimes close to the borderline of rage it happens that he suddenly turns to calmer, fresher regions and something opens up. No more brackwater nor backwaters there. Since that course we had often met and share some common interests: many topics to go through. Music is one, TV watching another, a third one is settled in ambitious pornographic fields.
„Did you see Lost?“
„Oh yes – how I love those series with such acurate and sophisticated details! Like when Sawyer sits at the beach reading a book of russian writer Ayn Rand, best known for her novel Atlas shrugged and her ideas of libertarism and self enforcement. That fits perfectly into the cosmos of wilderness the survivors of a plane crash found on that island. Or take the scene in Mad Men when a new painting in the chief´s etage was no lesser than a Mark Rothko.“
And when „lost“ ex-popstar Charlie left the listed highlights of his life on a piece of paper for his love – he called them his „greatest hits“, Torben told that he had the idea of writing down all his „misses“, relating to the fact of many traumatic periods passing his earlier lifetime. One reason why later great sympathy arose for sceptic philosophers and writers with an „always look at the dark side of life“-attitude. Positive Thinking he found boring.
„Why are crime stories thrilling? Cause everyone´s so happy and respectable? C´mon!“
One method of stopping his flaming up verbiages was crudely changing the subject. Cycling, by the way, was another of our shared passions. He once won his bike in a lottery on the Bahamas and was eager in telling that story repeatedly.
„Torben, tell me again about your bike!“
„It was a quite cheap but solid one with air wings and a butterfly imprint. Later I rebuild and renewed it, boosted it up, so to speak. Quite expensive but like a fairy tale was the ferry crossing back to New York and from there across the ocean to Pearl Harbour.“
I always wondered why he didn´t take the direct way back to his hometown Bremen.
„Because of the wind roses, the compass climax and some circumstances in the topos of falling in love, my dear!“ Ah, the Art of How to Fall that jazz singer Rebekka Bakken exposed on one of her albums? „Yeah, kind of this. She also sang that everything can change.“ According to that argument we walked on, again modifying our subject, this time talking about Mark Twain and some of our unsolved teeth problems.
[excerpt from the novel Talks with Torben, unpublished manuscript]