Mooseville Reprise 2012
It’s my second time in Finland during the summer.
I appear to have taken the weather with me - there is no blue above me - just swollen white spitting down a constant softening sodden rain.
I am always surprised at how easy everything is in Mooseville. My passage through the airport feels more like I am drifting - everyone is polite - everything is easy - I’m on a coach for the city faster than I remember to have a cigarette.
Granted - they often fail to understand me until I cynically adopt a robotic “Give me your boots and your motorcycle” flatness to my voice.
I do mumble though and the Irish lilt does appear to make you sound like you’ve had some sort of interesting stroke. People often wince as you talk, a worried look of wondering how they can help you communicate through the neurological disaster that has befallen you, at the same time as worrying whether or not you will soil yourself in their cafe.
The bus journey to the centre is always a strange fugue state of geography and architecture. At times I feel like I’m stumbling through portions of Detroit and Tasmania — others, I know exactly where I am. I have always found Mooseville’s architecture at strange disparities. At moments tall, stark — forbidding quasi-Soviet structures as they are broken by flourishes Russian seeming and otherwise.
It is a place in a constant state of breaking down — consuming itself and evolving — building the new beside or to crunch on top of the old. I vaguely heard there is some talk of protection orders outside the wooden old town. Beyond the blips of history — nothing feels static here — and in that, edifices perhaps have a certain nervous energy to them — they could be marked next week — gone next year — something glass and edgy in their place.
A €3 bag storage facility at the central train station is invaluable as I set off into the lisp spit rain. A shop in the train station informs me its umbrellas are €48 for a short umbrella €68 for a long one. Shocked - I knew Scandinavia was expensive but this… I stumble away out into rain and straight into beggar. (Later, whenever I mention this, Finns will always obsessively and pedantically add in the word “Rom” or “Romanian” whenever I say the word beggar.)
They (the beggars) have upped their game considerably compared to Dublin. I am momentarily glad of the soft ones we have — that just wander up to you with wide-wan pleading eyes and an open hand they rattle at you. I’m not sure my raw, peeled and dipped in salt brain could handle having to deal with legions of men on crutches performing some strange St. Vitus Dance for a few coins.
The cynic in me ponders the probability that one small ethnic community could be so commonly affected with a muscular disorder and waves the insistent well played spastic babblings of the beggar away - walks a hundred yards and straight into another.
While I imagine it is a forced measure on their part - down to Finnish pragmatism, cynicism and general all-round stubbornness that they have to swoop to such theatrics (if they are theatrics). I am deeply grateful that the nightmarish levels I witnessed in Bucharest have yet to spread. Where men stumble up to you with raw weeping wounds (possibly, or so people tell you) kept open with carbolic acid - abruptly jamming them in your face - leaving you only with images that will haunt your sleep.
Nevertheless, when walk around a block a bit later into the back of the first one walking perfectly normally, to see him pause at a corner before adopting the stance, there is a twinge of darkness and worry at the numb that must cause these lengths.
Granted, with Finland being so heavy in the tech industry, I was more expecting to see this
A trip to general Harrods or Jenners-esque superstore Stockman’s ends with a good long striding umbrella for €16 and exploring can begin. Walking a six or so block - turn left - six blocks or so back method - I imagine I will get to see more of Mooseville than previous visits. What I do find is that most shops in Mooseville seem to be specialist or artisan.
Walking here can be a distraction - perhaps it is some form of isolation - less damaged olfactory systems or a particularly Finnish nuance. But Finnish women smell nice - pleasant - there is none of the people walking around cloaked in a cloud of cleaning solvent smell. Perfumes are understated - interesting - sometimes catching. Differing breezes of the soft and the lovely in a crowd can sometimes make this city hard to concentrate in.
I see quite a lot of pubs. There is always a vague blandness to pubs in central Mooseville. It is clear the décor barely matters - they seem to exist only as places to pour booze into a facehole. I am tempted - but the ever-present advertisements of Finnish beer remind me of the harsh realities to drinking here.
With no malice in my heart - I can categorically say Finnish beers are close to the worst national beers I have ever tried. I didn’t quite notice my last Tuska - that is until I ended up parked up in remote Sweden with a rucksack variety of the stuff.
Two lone battered temulencists*, left with a fridge shelf filled with the stuff, could not - in the cold light of half-sober - finish more than three. That shelf was dead to us and apparently it took months for fool visitors to empty it. Which says something as at least one of us had sucked a spilt drink off a scotch guarded carpet back in darker times.
As for the other national drinks - they have “long drinks”. This is a decidedly fancy name for what would be called “alcopops” over on the islands. Their spirits - when you are not involved in some sort of shots competition with Finntroll - exist as a rare form of torture. I do not think they were meant to be drank for pleasure. Finns who tell you otherwise have drank the Kool-Aid on some mass cultural delusion. These things were put together to keep a people dour co-belligerents in times of war. One of them tastes of BBQ pig juice, the other a strange industrial alcohol accident involving mackerel. You get just drunk enough that you’ll be warm but still able to do your sniper work with the same cold dead precision you afford to killing any foreigners who threaten your lakes and saunas.
Granted - you may get overcome with guilt later and cry about it to a visiting foreigner who may have provided you with whiskey. Emotions are tricksy things in Finland.
Tearooms are secretly coffee houses and coffee is ever present. It is the black blood that keeps Finland pumping. Saying you don’t like it is greeted with quiet eye squinting suspicion. Sometimes outright incredulous ridicule.
Public transport tickets cover all modes for an hour. The clean friendly efficiency of Mooseville - really just has to be experienced. It’s not all correct but you are left taking bits of your home tracks apart and reassembling them with the best bits of Mooseville and just wondering as you sip another cup of coffee.
Looking back on these early writings of the thoughts and wrangles and odd little hopes, it is easy to see the person curious about living there. Ready to give it a chance.
Unaware of insurance mystics and bigot landlords with pervasive legal connections would be ready to try and break you whilst making you continually aware they thought of you as subhuman.
Unaware a man will try to burst your eyes and puncture your carotid artery.
*Temulencist is an archaic word for drunkard rediscovered by one Prof. Sploodge
Originally published 7/62012 before the inferno
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You can support the struggle through this nonsense and the rest, if you like, by buying Mooseville99 a ko fi or three or more ;)
Thank you for reading.
