Fully Loaded

My evening started off innocently enough, and with good intentions. I planned to go straight home after work. But after I packed my bag and put on my jacket I was greeted by a group of coworkers who had already begun drinking. They motioned for me to come over and have one with them. Sure, I thought, one can't hurt. It's Friday. Before I knew it, I was showing female colleagues pictures of a pair of cows sucks a man's nipples and penis as he lie naked in an open field. Then, moments later, I found myself ensnared in a philosophical debate about whether it would be just or unjust to beat a pony to death to save 100,000 human lives. Things were going off the rails, and fast. Somewhere in the recesses of my mind a voice yelled out, urging me to go home like I had originally planned. But I didn't listen. Instead I proceeded to invite myself to a party. But I didn't stop there. I took it upon myself to change the destination of the party. Earlier in the day a dear friend had mentioned there would be a Thanksgiving party in a bookstore. Remembering this, and recognizing the bookstore wasn't too far from my job, it seemed like a fine location for us travel.

"Have you been to this place before?" someone asked.

No.

"Well, how do you know if it's good?"

I don't.

"Oh, well, in that case, let's go!"

It was a hard sell, that much was true. There are times when one must face seemingly insurmountable social adversity. This was one such occasion. More would follow. I struggled to think of what I might say to convince them, so I just replied in the affirmative and told them their reservations were well-founded, that I could make absolutely no guarantees about the quality of the party. The only thing I could assure them was that there would be food and alcohol, and possibly a good story.

"If we look in the window and it sucks, we can leave," I added.

And like a magic spell had been cast, we were off. Our crew consisted of a me, my friend L, a cheeky Austrian, an American I'd never met before, and his girlfriend who looked remarkably similar to an ex girlfriend of mine from New York. At first I was a bit dumbstruck by her, just because of how much she looked like Georgia. When she extended her hand and said her name, I missed it entirely.

"Hi," I said, not even bothering to introduce myself while I ignored her name. I thought about showing her the bovine bestiality video, but thought better of it after a moment's reflection. Instead I showed her a photo which had been sent to me earlier in the day, by a Croatian girl, of an 80-year-old woman sucking on a massive dingdong. The photo was taken from the perspective of the man, and was way too close to the woman's face, showing each and every wrinkle with terrifying clarity.

We boarded the bus and made our way to the bookstore. We arrived and something seemed amiss. No one was outside, which was odd for a party like this. Surely a few stragglers should have perched themselves outside by the stairs chatting idly and smoking cigarettes. Nothing. Perhaps it was too cold. From the window I could see stacks of books and the shape of a human torso jutting out from a desk.

"Is this the place," the Austrian asked.

"Yep, this is it."

"Well, then, let's go in."

"I don't see a party," L said.

It was true. There was no trace of a party.

"Maybe it's in the basement," the American said. We all bent at the knee and tried to catch a glimpse in through the small window, but all we could see was a large wooden table with nothing on it.

"Just go in," the Austrian repeated.

I will, I told him. So I did. The American and the Austrian followed. I opened the door and walked into the quietest room I'd ever been in. In general, rooms that hold books are expected to be quiet. Libraries have taught me as much. But this was too quiet. Way too quiet. It was so quiet I could have sworn that I was able to hear sounds from the distant past, a powdery fart from the Pleistocene. But maybe this was only because we were expecting a party, and the kind of sounds associated with one. As the door shut behind us it seemed to seal off the rest of the universe and leave us in the vacuum of space. A man sat across from me, squarely in the right corner of the room, surrounded by several haphazard stacks of books. He looked up at me with that muddled mix of apathy and irritation that only an employee at the DMV could muster, and said nothing. About three feet in front of me sat an old man with his back turned to me, holding a newspaper in one hand and what looked like a turkey baster in the other. To the left of him, at another counter full of loose books, was a child mindlessly playing a video game. His face was lit up like a blue jack-o-lantern from the glow of the screen.

"Uhh," I said, disturbing the silence. The man in the corner stared at me blankly.

"Is there a Thanksgiving party here tonight?" I asked, feeling like a fool.

"Yes," the man replied, "at nine o clock."

"Ah, okay," I started to say as I realized it was probably seven, "we're a bit too early."

"Six fifty," muttered the old man whose face I couldn't see. I looked at his lifeless body and wondered whether he might be an enormous ventriloquist's dummy. His hair was hurriedly combed over, and his sweater, from what little I could see of it, looked like it hadn't been changed for at least the last quarter-century.

"Six fifty?" I asked.

"Fully loaded," he replied.

"What?"

"Yep!" he said, with forceful indifference. I felt like we had wandered into a bookstore somewhere in the deep south and we weren't welcome. All of that famous southern hospitality had been transformed into pure passive aggression. I turned to my comrades and they looked as confused as me.

"Ahhm, oh...okay," I said.

The old man smacked the turkey baster against his inner thigh and then spit on the floor. The child, without looking up, said, "das ist nicht gut."

The old man turned a page of his newspaper which made a sound so loud that it sizzled the air in a wash of static electricity. I could see his thinning hair stand on edge.

"I guess we'll...."

"Yeap!"

"...go...then."

"Yeap!"

The spectacled man in the corner stared. He looked down at his book and then up again a moment later to see if we were still standing there. When he saw that we were, he blinked and looked back down at his book. I have to say I was even more curious to attend the party after this interaction. Part of me didn't want to leave the room in case there was something else we might miss. It was clear enough that they didn't care whether we left or not, so maybe we could just sit on a bunch of books for two hours in silence and watch. But behind me I heard the door open and the world outside began to rush in, blowing away the atmosphere like a pile of dead leaves. I followed my team back outside.

"Wow," the American said, laughing, "that was amazing!"

"What just happened?" the Austrian asked.

L and the lovely lady looked at us curiously, also asking what just happened.

"Fully loaded," the American muttered.

"Yeah, what is that?" that Austrian asked, never having heard the expression.

"He meant that for six euros and fifty cents you could have an all inclusive Thanksgiving dinner; turkey, mashed potatoes, gravy, stuffing, cranberry sauce, sweet potatoes, you name it. They've got it all."

"Okay, so why don't we do it?" L asked.

"It's not until 9:00."

"How hungry is everyone? Do you want to wait?" he asked.

"Nah, let's get food nearby, there's a good Asian place two blocks away," the Austrian said.

So we walked a couple of blocks to a restaurant decorated with countless hanging paper lanterns. During dinner I was powerless to stop myself from telling wildly inappropriate stories. In one such story, as I went on about having sex on LSD, I blurted out the phrase, paradoxical sex. Immediately, and almost unanimously, I was challenged to explain what I meant by that combination of words.

"Well," I started, just to gather some information, "everyone here has done acid before, right?"

All no's, except for L, who had done acid numerous times but had never had sex while tripping.

"Jesus," I said, "tough crowd. Maybe I should first start with normal sex then, so that I can make the difference more clear."

"Wait, wait," my Austrian friend interjected, "normal sex? You're saying sex without LSD is normal sex?"

"Do you want to have a semantic debate?" I asked. "Normal sex, standard sex, sober sex, whatever you want to call it. The name we use isn't important so much as you have a concept of what sex is. I know for you, since you haven't had much experience, it might require a lot of imagination, but stick with me. Normally, when you have sex, it's a deeply psychological experience in addition to being a deeply physical one."

"Wait, what do you mean psychological?" he asked.

"Maybe it'll just be easier to show you. Do you want to come to the bathroom?"

"No."

"Okay" I continued,  "so by psychological I mean that sex feels better, a lot better, when you care about the person. When there's no emotional, psychological component to sex, certain body parts don't inflate or self lubricate and the entire thing becomes pretty hard."

"Or not pretty hard."

"Yeah, see, you're getting it. Now, the difference with sex on a psychedelic, is that you have moments where you transcend the ego. Your sense of self flickers in and out. One minute it's there and the next it's not. When this happens during intercourse you retreat into this primal sort of lizard-brain-self where you're gratifying the body with pure, unimpeded pleasure - there's no self processing or contextualizing things, so you're just experiencing raw sensation in real time without any filter. But - and here's the part where things start becoming paradoxical - because you're on a psychedelic, once you do flicker back into your sense of self a few moments or minutes later, you recognize you're having thoughts about sex and a new layer of dimensionality opens; you can see the narration in your head, you can contemplate the metaphysical, self-referential aspect of having sex. In the moment you're abstracting the experience to something intellectual that can be analyzed and described, mapped out in words. This process, of observing your thoughts while in a meditative trance state, while simultaneously tapping deeply into some primordial pleasure center that reaches further back into your DNA than what the modern human mind can make sense of, becomes really trippy and seemingly paradoxical because you're straddling two seemingly oppositional states."

Silence. Had I expressed myself clearly, or did I just ramble out some conversational diarrhea that wiped out the entire table in one massive convoluted mudslide? It wasn't clear.

"He's like a poet," L said, embarrassing me but breathing life back into the space.

"I need a coffee so I can think about what he just said," the American added.

"I'm going to the bathroom," said his girlfriend.

We shifted into safer topics after this. It didn't take long for the waiter to arrive at the table and tell us he had a new party that needed to be seated. We clawed our way out of the narrow Asian restaurant which had become surprisingly crowded. A line of people snaked down the stairs to the exit and it took a few minutes for people to make enough space to rearrange themselves so that we could open the door to get out. Outside of the door there was another maze of people standing on the remaining steps and the sidewalk in front of the restaurant.

After a quick smoke we got turned away from an exclusive cocktail bar and found ourselves at a nearby gay bar instead. Except there wasn't anything gay about it. The only reason we even knew it was a gay bar was because my friend L had told us. Actually, the only thing gay about it was that we had to sit outside in the cold because the inside was completely packed. It was here that I committed my biggest faux pas of the evening. Somehow the conversation had gravitated toward Louis CK and his controversial return to comedy. I felt the irresistible pull of conversational suicide tugging at my testes. I knew what was about to happen. I was about to defend him. Don't, please. But I couldn't stop myself.

"Okay, let's talk about this," I began, a little sheepishly, "a problem that I often have with these types of discussions is that they invariably hinge on the notion that women are these weak, helpless little creatures who, lacking any sort of agency or rational thought, have no choice in these matters but to be the victims of abuse at the hands of powerful men. I don't buy it: it's sexist and it's damaging to the notion of equality. Do abuses of power happen at the hands of men? Absolutely. Do we live in a male dominated society where we need to denounce these terrible motherfuckers and stand behind our wives, daughters, friends, lovers? Absolutely. That's not what I'm trying to get at though. I'm talking about stereotypes, and the language we use, the ideas we throw around without thinking. Because above her womanhood she is a person, just like any other person, regardless of sex; able to stand up for herself and lash out against injustice when she sees it. At the end of the day we're more similar than we are different, and to say otherwise is to take away a part of our humanity, of the thing that binds us. We all bleed, we hurt, we ache, we yearn for attention and happiness, we want to be adored and take care of those that we love, we want fairness and respect, to be treated kindly. Some of us have penises and some of us have vaginas - some of us even have both - but how reductionist (and also divisive) is it to take away someone's individuality by labeling them as just a man or just a woman. In this case, the story we tell ourselves about women shapes the entire dialogue and it becomes impossible to talk about the topic and question basic assumptions without being labeled as unsympathetic to the cause, or as somehow chauvinistic."

"You do sound chauvinistic," my Austrian associate replied,

"Oh shut up, Adolf. Hear me out. I'm trying to draw attention to that fact that language is powerful. It's self fulfilling. If we talk about women as victims, and we treat them like victims, then that's what they'll be. It is profoundly disempowering not only to feminist ideology, but to all women everywhere to perpetuate that narrative. That this mechanism can go unchallenged and unexamined by those in casual conversation is part of the problem. We need to look this thing in the face and call it what it is. It's the only way we can begin telling ourselves a new story."

"So you really believe that?" he said condescendingly, "you think that women aren't being oppressed by men who use their power against them? You think that it's not worth drawing attention to the fact that it's harder for women than men, that they have to worry about things that to us, because of our position of privilege, we don't even need to expend the energy on?"

"Yeah, that sounds so naive," the beautiful Swedish ex-lookalike said.

I was losing this argument. I had never said any of the things I was being accused of, but it was clear that I hadn't yet generated enough social capital to seem credible, and that by trying to ask deeper questions I was being seen as part of the problem. To them, I had minimized the female struggle and seemed to live in a fantasy land where the societal power imbalance between men and women didn't exit. I had effectively said, all lives matter. My point wasn't coming across.

"But it's not true! I'm on your side," I wanted to yell, "I studied sociology for fuck's sake." But saying this wouldn't have helped. It was too late for me.

"Listen," I replied, "all I'm saying, is that I don't think - in Louis CK's case - that these women were victimized. I just don't. This wasn't some Harvey Weinstein or Bill Cosby shit. One woman said she was traumatized, traumatized,  because Louis was masturbating while he was on the phone with her. C'mon. Hang up the phone. What kind of argument is that?"

"That's not fair," the Swede said, "he was leveraging his power over these women."

"Were they his employees?" I asked, rhetorically. "If what you're saying is true, then these female comics were hoping - whether consciously or unconsciously - to use Louis' power to launch their careers. Were they not using him in the hopes of securing a more powerful position? They were putting themselves into a position of vulnerability and subservience. And perhaps because of this they allowed things to go a bit too far. Then, in hindsight, once they stopped and looked back on the events that happened fifteen years ago, they might have felt a kind of shame and self loathing that maybe they couldn't handle. What do people do when they have feelings about themselves that they don't want to confront? They project them onto someone else; they assign accountability so they don't have to take the blame. It's human."

"So you're blaming the victim now?" the Austrian asked.

"No, I asserted that they weren't victims at the start." Things were off the rails.

"How can you say that?" the Swede asked.

It was time to abandon ship. This wasn't going anywhere and I was digging a hole deeper and deeper. I was in violation of the first rule of comedy: know your audience. There were no allies for me. So, I did the only thing it made sense to do - it was time to show, not tell. To demonstrate my point, an experiment was to be conducted. The best way to illustrate my argument would be to show how intolerant of abuse people actually are. So, I leaned back in my cold plastic chair, undid my zipper, pulled out my fully loaded turkey baster, and started basting. Master basting. In front of everyone. Right away the Swede shrieked in horror and, a moment later, doused me with the remainder of her gin and tonic. The ice bounced off the bridge of my nose and the sliced cucumber slid slowly down my cheek. The Austrian suddenly sprouted a narrow mustache and began barking something at me in German, something about taking me to camp.

The American stood up and said, "I won't stand for this," which I found incredibly ironic.

Everyone rushed away in disgust, except for L, who, opening his mouth wide and taking my entire baster in his mouth, showed me - with a paradoxical blowjob - why it was called a gay bar.

Giving Thanx

I’d meant to write something tonight, in honor of Thanksgiving. Instead I sat on my couch mindlessly surfing Instagram for at least an hour. Maybe two. I saw pictures of beautiful models, friends, friends of friends, friends of friends of friends, some talented tattoo artists, and untold quantities of memes. I really need to delete Instagram. It takes up entirely too much time. The ease at which it’s possible to get sucked into a scroll hole is mindbending. Have you ever noticed how when people are scrolling through social media it looks like they’re trying to get their phones off, sexually? It’s a fucking stroke fest. Literally sitting there stroking the glass in small, precise movements. There’s something deeply uncomfortable about it. 

But my phone is not what I wanted to write about. It’s Thanksgiving! Well, not here in Berlin, but in my mind, and in America. It was strange to be at the office today because my body just didn’t want to work. It’s been conditioned for the past 32 years to expect a day of food and leisure, conversation and wine, friends and family. But there were no such things. I guess that’s not completely true. I ate. Multiple times; breakfast, and then lunch with a coworker who I really do consider a friend. The evening was spent cooking ricotta and spinach tortellini in garlic and oil sauce, sans garlic. To pair, there was a mixed salad, of arugula, lettuce, kale, more spinach, and some broccoli. Lots of broccoli. So much broccoli that I struggled to eat it all. You know how to say broccoli in German? Brokkoli. It sounds more dangerous. Like breakoli. Break your fucking teeth on a nice frozen piece of broccoli. 

Why doesn’t broccoli flavored ice cream exist? Why am I writing about broccoli flavored ice cream? It’s Thanksgiving for god sakes. Cranberry sauce ice cream is where it’s at. 

Ok, clearly I lack the focus to write about the things I wanted to. I guess that’s okay. The artistic impulse isn’t a thing that can always be controlled. Perhaps it never should be. It tells the artist, the artist does not tell it. We’d do well to get out of its way. 

I wanted to write about the odd psychological aspect of being far away from home on a national holiday. So far from home that my residing country doesn’t partake in the familiar festivities. The body retains a memory of these things though, and begins to wonder where the turkey is. It starts to ask, “where is everyone?” The mind, sensing the body’s distress, arrives on the scene and tries to employ reason: it’s not Thanksgiving here. But the body doesn’t fully understand, and so it holds on to some level of expectation, believing that this random Thursday night might have something more to offer, that it can’t just be FaceTiming your family as they sit down to dinner and you stare at your father and his one remaining tooth as he yells happily into the phone about drinking your uncle under the table. But it is. And that’s enough. The day is meant for giving thanks. 

And I did. 

But I miss stuffing. Butt stuffing. Where all my Truthähne at?

Gemütlich as Fuck

Today I got some new furniture, a thing I ordinarily don't do. A swiveling velvet armchair to stick in the corner, and a sweet little cabinet to put my amplifier on. The wood is beautifully flamed on the two front doors of the cabinet, which are a paler shade than the rest, and framed by my cherry-wood speakers the combination of the colors give my parquet floors a lovely compliment.  The apartment is coming together, it only took about seven months. I've never been one to take pleasure in the possession of things, especially those things which will likely end up on the sidewalk when it's time to leave Berlin, but there is something comforting about cultivating a cozy space. This will be even more true once winter comes and fills the city with frosted windows, gives all the roofs glassy teeth.

I can't explain how nice it is to experience seasons again. Full force seasons. That's not to say San Francisco didn't have seasons, because it did, but not with the same intensity.  

Let's see what I'm saying once winter arrives.

Now fall has fallen. Colorful leaves rain down like flecks of rust from the limbs of balding trees. They litter the streets. Today, when passing in front of Hasenheide park, in the center of the lawn where people sat beside their bikes drinking beers and laughing, there was a tree surrounded at its trunk in a thick pile of yellow leaves. I wished I had my camera to capture how striking it looked. Q has admonished me for not carrying my camera with me everywhere I go in Berlin. In truth I've barely taken a single photo. The only proper photos I took in Berlin were of Nadine. Maybe this weekend I'll take a trip to the Elbe Mountains near Dresden. Apparently there are some stunning hikes there and it's only about two hours from Berlin. I remember seeing the area from the train window on the way to Prague. There was a river, or was it a stream, that danced in and out of the foreground while old looking mountains and the occasional castle jutted up into the scene.

But there's always the possibility of staying in town this weekend. A friend is playing a show. It would be nice to abstain from partying for another weekend, but I can't make any guarantees. As good as it is to give the body a rest, these are the last days of nice weather - it might be wise to enjoy them while they last. There's always this tug of war between surplus and scarcity, satisfaction and yearning, doing and not doing. On the one hand, we should make it a point to soak up every moment of every day, to seek stimulation and the exhilaration of excess, if only for the sole reason that one day we'll die. While we exist we should experience all that's offered to us, and often. But even existing, in this sense, isn't so simple and can be further broken down into types of existence; while we exist and are able-bodied, while we exist and are still young. The mantra should be do what you can while you can, before you can't. It's imperative that we live life in the imperative. This doesn't mean all of life should be spent in some gluttonous, hedonistic pursuit of pleasure at the cost of everything else, but rather, that we live passionately. Not with blind passion, however. We should also be passionate about tempering our passions when the situation calls for it - in situations where we might be wrong, or when our passions may hurt someone else, or ourselves. The guidelines are straightforward enough, but impossible to get right all the time.

Here's to trying.

SS

I know I have stories to finish, but I don't have the energy tonight. I also don't want to let more than a few days get away from me without writing because that'll break the habit. Early yesterday I helped two friends move. Together with a team of maybe six Germans, we placed all of the couple's belongings in a large Mercedes van and sent them off. Certain pieces of furniture were back-breaking, notably a 300lb bed that had three grown men struggling and grunting, and a wooden desk that was surely made of stone. They moved from Berlin to southern Germany, not far from Munich. After the van was packed and I gave them long hugs goodbye, they donated me a plant. It has become a German tradition for me to inherit the plants of parting friends, perhaps to keep me company. I wonder if plants feel unsafe in a new home the way animals might. Marie's plant, which I've named Hans von Bismark, is leaning strangely forward since yesterday, as if he's about to fall right out of his pot. I hope transporting him here wasn't too stressful. Marina's plants are doing well. Maybe being near to my small cacti provides them a sense of community. Hans is over in the corner by the ladder and the wireless router, completely estranged from his leafy green brethren.

My back was a bit strained after the move so I took it easy. I ran some errands, the last of which involved picking up an amplifier to evaluate over the weekend. The music it makes with my speakers is fine, but the new system doesn't sound as nice as in San Francisco. Perhaps the acoustics of this room aren't as good; the ceilings here are much taller. What the amplifier lacks in warmth and bass, it makes up for in clarity. Earlier it tackled "Gold Dust Woman" beautifully, rendering those drobo drags with perfectly dreamy dimensionality. The backing vocals full of howling that emerge in the latter part of the song were reproduced so eerily well that I thought someone in the courtyard was yelling. I'm not sure if I'll keep the amplifier though because I find the bass really lacking in fullness. As mentioned before, this might be a problem of the room and not so much a fault of the amplifier, so I'll need to think it over. I also find it doesn't sound that great at lower volumes, either.

All day I've felt drained. It's not even 9:30 yet, or, as we like to say in Germany, 21:30, but I think I'm going to get ready for bed.

Sleepy Sunday.

cOcktoberfest

Hallo! Guten Abend Leute! It's been a long time. It doesn't feel that way, but surely, at least based on the number on my calendar, I cannot deny that we've all been hurtling through the present into the future for many moons now. Is everyone a bit taller now? Maybe a little bit more of a baller? I hope so.

Over the last few days there have been repeated petitions for me to start writing here again. And though the numbers be few, the time seems right to indulge friends and family. Afterall, how else will they be able to stay up to date on my deterioration. Wow, I spelled that correctly on my first try. Maybe my mind's not as messed up as it seems. Berlin has been abusive on the brain; the parties, the drugs, the sex clubs. Speaking of which, I was at one two Saturday's ago. I stayed home from work on Tuesday because the cumulative damage of being doused in piss in the women's bathroom of Kit Kat had taken its toll on my immune system. As I lie asleep in my bed I was buzzed awake by my phone which I'd neglected to silence. The message was from a co-worker. He'd sent me a text saying I hope you're okay, followed by a link from Germany's equivalent of the CDC which had begun urging everyone who'd been at Kit Kat on Saturday to seek out immediate medical attention. There had been an outbreak of viral meningitis. Great. Grrreat!

Tony the Tiger didn't have shit on me.

Actually, now that you mention it, I do vaguely remember a man with dinner-plate sized pupils wearing a tiger onesy and shitting into another man's mouth in front of an open bathroom stall. There's our patient zero right there, boys. Fecophilia for the win! I'm kidding, but that probably did happen at this club. It's hard to describe the place: it really needs to be experienced. Inconceivably, there's a sauna and a pool inside. Have I written about this here before? It's been so long I've forgotten. I've only gone twice, but the spunky charm isn't something that can easily be washed away; from one's clothes, skin, eyes, memory. Everyone is naked, or almost naked, wearing latex or fishnets, or nipple tape. On the dancefloor in the basement I saw an old man masturbating while a leather-clad man viciously spanked a girl's ass raw in front of a bunch of giddy onlookers. Around the corner, people were fucking on hospital beds. In the hallway a black girl with curly hair and a flat stomach was fingering herself on a couch. The level of unfettered hedonistic bohemian depravity cannot be adequately conveyed, even by a filthy reprobate like me.

But Berlin clubs aren't what I want to write about here. If you want to see those, come visit me. We'll stay out til sunrise in hazy, smoke-filled clubs dancing to blaring minimalist techno til your toes bleed. What I want to talk about is human connection and closeness. Sharing spaces. Creating spaces to share. Being in time with another person. Those around us are infinitely special. It should be our duty, not just as people, but as bringers of the tide, to discover what that special quality in another is, and celebrate it. Rain love down upon them in a warm sparkling fucking jamboree, you know, like in the bathrooms at Kit Kat.

I finally got my ass back in the gym this morning. Already my muscles are sore and sleepy. It's 8:30 but it feels like my balls are turning into pumpkins. I realize there isn't a need for such vulgarity and talk of testicles, but I also realize there isn't a need to write anything at all. So I'm going to purge this pent-up scatological energy like a morbidly obese impacted woman spraying tsunami torrents of shit from her blackened spasmodic anus. Ah, yeah, there's a segue for us. Gather round children, gather round. Let me treat you to a tragic tale of woe from a few weeks ago. I forgot that I had started to write something for you all:

I’m writing this from where I sit on a cold toilet, perched on the rim like a stone gargoyle.

--Currently, shit is spraying in long fountains from my asshole--

About fifteen minutes ago I drank a bottle of medicinal-strength diuretic to prepare my digestive tract for some raunchy double-penetration. It tasted cloying, like saltwater and cough syrup.

-- Piss is pouring madly out of my ass right now--

There’s no reason to even wipe it. To do so would be futile, like trying to mop at a monsoon. Tears are streaming warmly from my brown eye, down my cheeks, over the backside of my balls. Luckily the unopened package of baby wipes on the sink will allow me to deal with this as frictionlessly as possible. Terrible bouts of intestinal turbulence torment my insides. The smell is wretchedly cheesy. How have I wandered so wayward, dear reader? What sordid circumstances led me here, a hostage on the porcelain throne? Well, I’ll tell you how I’ve come to find myself at the mercy of modern medicine’s ass-obliterating alchemy. Such a diabolical arsenal of liquid laxatives are a warm gun fit to be aimed only at the head of a dolt like me. It all started in mid July, just outside of Dublin:

I was to travel to Ireland for a friend’s wedding.

--I’m shitting with enough force that I think it just ricocheted off the bowl and back onto my ass--

In the weeks before I’d arrived, Ireland had been hit by record warming. When we rode out of Dublin I could see the historically green-haired hills dyed blonde in uneven patches. My friend James said a lack of rainfall threatened crops all across the countryside. Irish lads everywhere were scattering to nearby bars where the SPF of pub roofs were said to be a whopping 1000 (thanks for the numbers, Seamus). The landscape was reminiscent of northern California, in the rolling golden hills of Sonoma.

We got to the wedding and sat in sweaty suits under the blaring midday sun. It was small, a couple dozen people at most, mainly from France and Ireland but with a few San Franciscan exceptions.

--Imagine if I were a chocolate cow being milked; imagine the sound of it hitting the metal bucket--

The night before the wedding we took a cab ride to the castle grounds where the ceremony and party were to take place. Some of the guests had already arrived, mostly family members of the bride, Sara. It was clear by the empty bottles of wine and the Irish air of inebriation that the pre-party had officially begun, probably hours ago. A fresh bottle of wine was opened for us. T, James and I began drinking. We continued to do so until several more bottles had been sacrificed on the altar of coming matrimony.

--Okay, the shitstorm has been reduced to a mere drizzle--

So on this beautifully sunny wedding day, we eagerly awaited the opening of champagne bottles, or, at least I did. From where I sat I could see the ingredients for fishbowl-sized glasses of Negronis waiting to be assembled. At some point, and I must have been distracted by the shining bottles of booze because I didn’t notice this, but a donkey had made its way into the wedding party. With a glistening mane and a goofy, absentminded kind of self-importance, it paraded around and stole the gaze of children and parents alike as the onlookers looked on confused. Later we’d come to learn that this was part of a joke the bride wanted to play on the groom, or vice versa.

After the vows were exchanged I proceeded to drink countless cocktails, numerous beers, untold quantities of wine, and more swigs of Buckfast than I care to admit before smoking some pot. After that, I remember the angry face of a man whose girlfriend kept chatting to me and giggling at things I don’t remember saying. I remember dancing in a kitchen and playing giant Jenga while antagonizing my opponents with a Godzilla-like frenzy. The next morning there were pictures of Polaroids on my phone of me posing with people I don’t know.

--Okay, I’m leaving the bathroom now--

In the morning a hangover greeted me as a retaliation to my revelry; balance. Some hair of the dog helped, but set me on a dangerous path of risking repeating yesterday’s and yesterday’s mistakes. In the hotel room a live version of Velvet Underground’s “Waiting For My Man” played,

Feel sick and dirty, more dead than alive

We sped back down to Dublin to meet our friends Seamus and Krista. But first we had to check in at our hotel. Dragging our luggage from the car to the room was a miserable ordeal that I would have paid someone handsomely to have avoided. The weight of T’s bag, which was surely 300lbs, and full of bowling balls - or the limbs of stolen sculptures from the latter period of the Renaissance - broke me. Carrying them up the stairs gave me multiple hernias which roamed openly around my lower abdomen like cats chasing each other under a blanket. Once we made it to the room I collapsed into the bed and begged Jesus to end my suffering. Rocking back and forth in fetal position, chanting please, please Jesus, I shook my hernias like holy maracas while I waited for James to park the car. T laughed at me and took pictures. After James arrived we decided to go somewhere close by to get food. Because the final game of the World Cup was on, most of the bars were crowded and obnoxiously noisy. This landed us at capitalism’s safe haven, The Hard Rock Cafe. I struggled to drink the frosty glass of Guinness that sat in front of me while I ate my macaroni and cheese and tried not to vomit. My stomach was badly bloated at this point but I soldiered on. By the time I finished eating I had a pain in my chest.

From the looks of it, I appeared to be in my third trimester. The fingers on my left hand had grown partially numb and they tingled with an irritating pins-and-needles premonition. Of course when large quantities of alcohol are involved one cannot help but wonder if maybe this time is the last time; if this is the proverbial straw that broke the camel’s back.

We finished eating and then walked to a nearby bar to watch the game and wait for Seamus and Krista. My condition worsened rapidly and it became increasingly clear that some type of cardiac catastrophe was galloping my way. I was sure of it. My nerves were shot. My liver was leather. My mind was a stinking swamp. My kidneys had shriveled and dried out, become raisins. My heart must have also suffered an equally toxic transformation. Palpitations. Skipped beats. This wasn’t a remix, it was an attack. A stroke, not of genius, but of the heart. I couldn’t shake it. I couldn’t take it. Almost, almost as I sat there at the table in front of T and James watching Croatia lose to Spain, I almost had a panic attack were it not for the sudden arrival of Krista and Seamus.

After a few minutes it became clear they were only in marginally better shape than I was. They’d been partying at a festival for days, carousing with Irish poets and getting far too little sleep inside a far too little tent. So gently at first, and then fiercely, we commiserated on the relentless nature of our self abuse, questioning our illogical behavior while pounding a few more pints of Guinness before we relocated to a nearby bar. It was here that Seamus pulled me aside and revealed his secret. He looked me in the eyes, put his hand on my shoulder and pulled it in real close.

He said, "O, it was awful. I didn't think I was going to make it out. I was curled up in the hotel room with the fear of God in me. Just terror, pure terror."

"I know, Seamy," I said, "I know exactly how you feel. It was real bad. I thought I was dying right before you guys arrived. James and T were gonna have to watch me go into cardiac arrest and throw me in the back of an ambulance."

I looked at him knowingly and slowly lifted up my shirt. I held out one of my misshapen hernia lumps to him, placed it in one hand, and then the other. With a relieved smile, he did the same. While I don't remember much of what happened after this, I do remember drinking more. At one point my stomach was so full of Guinness it looked like the Hindenburg. I remember one of us literally eating ice cream off the sidewalk. I remember someone almost slipping on a puddle of vomit. But I don't think that was near the ice cream. We were all staying in the same hotel, and since we had to catch a flight back to Berlin in the morning, we decided to do the responsible thing and call it a night. In the morning after we said our goodbyes James dropped T and I off at the airport.

We spent the next week in Berlin drinking morning, noon, and night, with no breaks in between. Well, there were little breaks, ones where we'd go see the Berlin Wall or the Victory Column, Brandenburg Gate and other touristy things, but what you have to know about Berlin is that you can drink in the streets. So every time we were walking, we were drinking. By the end of the trip, after we'd been drinking already for countless hours, I realized I wasn't even drunk. Didn't even have a buzz. I won't tell you what I had to do to get one.

Who am I kidding, yes I will! We had to drink three carafes of wine and three shots. Each. This is when I knew we had achieved something truly monstrous. To attack one's liver with such perverse persistence is not normal.

Wait.

I know I'm in the middle of a story about an impending colonoscopy, but I just realized it's Oktober and I haven't gone to an Oktoberfest party! I was invited to one on Saturday, but I smoked pot and saw a movie with a friend instead. After, having successfully smuggled half a bottle of wine each into our bellies during the film, we sat drinking on the dirty subway floor while listening to Velvet Underground on my phone while we waited for another friend to arrive and take us to a party where we'd continue to drink and dance til well into Sunday. What I mean to say is that my time for a proper Oktoberfest stein-guzzler is running out. There's a German myth, a children's fairy tale I believe, about what happens if one misses Oktoberfest. Legend has it that should you forfeit your patriotic duty to swill liter after liter of authentic German beer until you pass out in a gutter wearing a pair of Lederhosen that you've pissed in, you must suffer the fearsome blitzkrieg of cOcktoberfest. I don't think I need to explain much about what that involves. I'll try to attend a party tomorrow to prevent this.

Pray for me friends, pray for me.

(I'll write more tomorrow...or the day after...or the day after that)

Pit Lords and Ladies

Pit Lords and Ladies

Today I go to pickup friends at the airport. I’m actually on my way there now. At 19 stops, the U7 takes me most of the way. The remainder of the journey will be a single stop on a bus. To ensure I’d be awake for this early morning adventure, I went to sleep at around 10:30 last night and forfeited the chance to sleep with two different women; a German girl who lives within walking distance of my apartment, and a fun Argentinean dj living here in Berlin. My friends will be ungrateful for my sacrifices, of course, but who can blame them? I considered masturbating before bed and ejaculating into the pillowcases they’d be sleeping on during their stay. 

“These pillows smell like bleach,” they’d say. 

“Yeah, would you rather they smell dirty?” I’d reply. 

But luckily for them I didn’t have the heart. I didn’t want to go overboard with vengeance. Instead I constructed elaborate pubic-hair voodoo dolls in their likeness and cast a blood curse on their sex lives which should last for about the next decade. I just googled blood curse and, this word, it doesn’t mean what I think it means:

“...is when an orc or group of orcs consume the demonic blood of a powerful pit lord to gain supernatural strength, speed, resilience and stamina.”

Fuck, I wish someone would cast a blood curse on my libido. Where can I find myself a resourceful group of orcs and a gullible pit lord? I’m sure I’ll be able to find at least one of them this weekend in a dungeon inside Berghain or Kit Kat. Keta will need to be stockpiled to produce the necessary delirium in the pit lord. Maybe I can draw some blood without the help of the orcs. Hell, maybe I’ll be able to mainline it right into my dick right there on the spot. 

This is the first time I’ve taken public transit to Tegel airport. It’s slightly more inconvenient to get to than Schönefeld is, but not by much. It makes up for this with its lack of umlauts. My friends, known terrorists and Nazi sympathizers, may have trouble at customs this morning. I wonder how much of a delay there will be because of this. My one friend, Nicole, had her nipples replaced with fidget spinner swasticas that will certainly go off as she passes through the metal detector. Alfie, who’s face simply

SCREAMS white power, not only has a tattoo of a Hitler mustache on the underside of his penis, but is also sporting an SS tramp stamp underneath a mountain of ass hair which he on special occasions shaves to show off his hidden message. Once, after he’d been recruited by ISIS to be the star villain of a terror attack he would ultimately botch, instead of exploding when it was time to blow himself up inside Madison Square Garden he pulled down his pants and began to enthusiastically auto-fellate himself while repeatedly coming up for air and shouting Allahu akbar in between breaths. Luckily, because he had no weapons or explosives when the police arrived he claimed plausibility deniability and said it was performance art. 

Well I just got to the gate. The plane landed two minutes ago. I guess they failed hijacking once again...unless Alfie told her it meant jacking off in the bathroom. 

What I Remember

Let's take acid, she said. It'll be fun, she said. We'll go to an underground party in Leipzig. Where the fuck is Leipzig? It's about an hour or so south of Germany; we can take a train. So I asked around and my friends told me that Leipzig is where everyone who's getting forced out of Berlin because of rising costs is going. The art scene is supposed to be thriving and, best of all, it's cheap. I doubted whether we'd see much of the city, given we would be arriving on a post-midnight train and then spending the rest of our time in an old warehouse, but I was up for the adventure. Before the show she cooked us some pasta with leftover spices from our recent trip to Italy and then we hurried off to meet her friends. Her friend, a cute blonde named Nasty, was having a few people over for drinks. N and I arrived before everyone else. On her walls were four large canvases; two in front of me behind the couch, and two to my right against the far wall. The two which were closest were okay, a kind of a Pollocky splattering of paint across a darkish intergalactic void. This one her boyfriend painted. The ones to the right however were more interesting. They were soft, cottony looking clouds that gave me the feeling of a fog clearing. I complimented her on her work and soon more friends arrived. A guy with slicked-back hair and a French looking mustache entered the room. He firmly shook my hand before sitting back onto the couch in a practiced sort of way. He was with a girl, a friend of N's I'd met before. After a brief hug hello she sat on the couch in front of us with Nasty and the mustached man. The girls went for a break, to smoke and chit chat and catch one another up on the latest gossip. This left me and the stache alone. What I mistook at first as a kind of youthful bravado and conditioned indifference quickly translated into a lack of confidence on his part. I cannot speak good English he told me. Ah, it's okay, I said, Ich spreche kein Deutsche, so you're already ahead of me. He looked at me and smiled. In truth I am not very comfortable speaking in English, but there is something about you which makes me feel okay. I thanked him and told him it's because I have a small dick, and then he left to go for a smoke as well.

When they returned I ran downstairs to the late shop to grab a beer and another bottle of wine. N and I left not long after. At this point my memory begins getting fuzzy. At N's I'd had a beer, half a bottle of wine, and a small bottle of liquor that we were to put the liquid acid in. I remember walking to the train with her, but I have little recollection of the ride. Then we were walking on an overpass towards a warehouse at the bottom of a hill. We had to walk around the perimeter and find our way down. People hung out in small groups outside, smoking, talking, tripping. Inside the place was large and the main dancefloor was in the belly of the building which was only accessible by walking down one of two flights of industrial looking metal stairs on each side of the room. The DJ booth was wreathed in a blacklight-sensitive fishnet-patterned fabric that looked like spiderwebs. I don't remember when we took the acid, maybe just before going in, or just after, but the one thing I do remember is taking too much. What was meant to be a sip was more of a swallow. N looked at me with irritation and told me I was supposed to save that to split with her later. Oops. Next I remember a lot of dancing. I remember searching through what I could have sworn were catacombs for a bathroom. Inside each nook and cranny were couples or little bunches of people hanging out and talking. Each time I poked my head through another hole looking for somewhere to piss I was popping little conversational bubbles and temporarily disrupting parties. Eventually I found a bathroom. I don't remember if I pissed or shat, but I hope I wiped.

We were walking back over the bridge and the world was glowing with early morning light. Away from the sound of the music and the cloak of the club's darkness I realized how drunk I was, so I sat on the stairs of the station to regroup while N fiddled with the machine for tickets. The exhaustion that was on me was not unpleasant, but it was near complete. All I wanted to do was lie down and sleep. Instead N handed me a vegan ham sandwich she'd pulled out of her bag. I smiled and told her I couldn't eat that now. She seemed a bit edgy to me but I didn't have the energy to figure out why. Then we were on the train. I must have fallen asleep. When I woke up we were almost home, but something felt different to me. There was a quality to the train that felt synthetic, too typical, or too symmetrical, too Wes Anderson. The sleep must have given my mind enough energy to chew on some more of the acid. It started gently at first, like a sneeze coming on slowly. A smile stretched my lips and giggles bubbled up out of my lungs. Then more of them. Soon I was chuckling to myself at nothing. Well, it wasn't nothing exactly, it was something, but something that isn't easy to name. Everything felt wonderfully funny to me. Being alive felt beautiful. And the realization that it could ever appear as anything otherwise seemed so comically absurd. My laughter was self infectious. I'd slipped straight into a perpetual laughter loop, and I was loving it. There was probably little mystery about my condition to those seated in my vicinity; I was dressed outlandishly, with a colorful hippie headpiece draped around my neck and a shimmering golden jacket hanging from my shoulders. We looked like we'd been out all night. I didn't get the impression that my laughter was disturbing anyone, but even if the police had intervened and asked me to stop I doubt I would have been able to do so. It went on this way for about fifteen minutes until the train arrived at the station and then N and I hurried to the train that would take us back to her place. She still seemed a bit off to me, like there was some static coming off of her, but there was little I could do to help.

Soon we were home. Then our clothes were off. Her body looked incredible. It was flawless. I remember thinking about how perfect her pussy looked and how wet it was, about how much I loved her ass, her perky tits, her eyes, those coy breathy sounds she was making, the way her body would shake. I remember feeling numb and tingling, each cell wriggling with wild sexual delight. I remember not wanting it to end.

Quick Update

It's been brought to my attention that I haven't been writing here frequently enough - and by a girl who doesn't even know I write. It's a sad state of affairs when you're too busy to document the new adventures of your life. There's so much to write about; my slow progress on learning German and tricking them into taking me in as one of their own; the food here; the unusually beautiful winter weather; the women; finding an apartment. Today was my first day of work after a three-month semi sabbatical. It feels strange to be beholden to someone other than myself again. The truly unusual and unnatural nature of the employer/employee relationship is felt most clearly upon return. Especially in this case, when it is the employer who essentially sets the conditions of my stay in their country. It is far too much power to wield over the head of another - in addition to the implicit threat of poverty at the loss of livelihood.

My first day of work was good though. My boss is great and my immediate teammates seem cool. It'll take about 90 days for me to have a better sense of things, but my initial impressions are positive. Having only 200 employees, the company here is far smaller than any I've worked at so far. It feels like a small family. It's the Cheers of tech startups.

I'm nearly done painting my apartment, and I've ordered a nice bed. Now I only need a bed frame, internet access, a washing machine, and to have lights installed. I've selected some cool LED bulbs that look like old Edison bulbs to hang from the ceilings. Sometime within the next two weeks everything should be sorted. I got news today that my personal possessions from San Francisco have been delayed and won't arrive until early April, which is shit. There's little I can do, but it doesn't bode well for my things making it here safely and on time.

More updates to come when I have more time. Gute Nacht for now.

B.I.G

Bonjour from Berlin! I’ve only been here for a week, but time is flying by. I’ve spent countless hours wandering the sometimes cobblestoned streets of Neukölln and Friedrichshain, I’ve looked at a bunch of possible flats, learned heaps of new words, made a few new friends, and went out to a club where they played all of the greatest guilty pleasures from the 80’s and 90’s. At the end of that night, after dancing until well after sunrise to Whitney Houston, The Eagles, Rod Stewart and The Backstreet Boyz, I realized I was outrageously hungry (and clearly gay). I begged my friends to take me somewhere, anywhere, that I might find food. Minutes later, laughing drunkenly and giggling on our way, we arrived at a Turkish bakery that had literally just opened. I forced the door open and ran straight to the display case where all the food was. With my face pressed firmly against it, with the flat curiosity of a pet fish, I eyed my options and selected what appeared to be a bologna sandwich. Marina looked at me to confirm it was what I wanted and then told the woman I’d have the wurst.

“No!” I yelled.

Everyone stopped and stared at me. “Nein,“ I clarified, “I’ll have the BEST, not the worst!” No one seemed to find this as funny as me, so I just gave up and told her to give me her wurst. Three bites was all it took to devour the sandwich. Never before had liverwurst tasted so good. This is Deutschland.

There is something about this city that I haven’t been able to name just yet. It is outwardly gruff and often times filthy, covered in graffiti and trash, but despite this the place maintains some redeeming quality. It reminds me of hideously ugly woman with a great personality; you find yourself oddly attracted even though all of the normal mechanisms are misfiring. The weather is gray and oppressive for most of the year, but everyone tells me it will be magical in the summer, which, I am also frequently told, is a quite a long ways away. Despite this, there is a deep and warming camaraderie in Berlin, particularly, it seems, amongst expats. Last night I had dinner at a packed ramen joint where Kreuzberg meets Neukölln, right on the river. The restaurant was decorated to look like it was straight out of Japan; full of lanterns and wooden counters, bamboo, small candles, and even smaller Japanese waitresses. I struck up a conversation with an Italian guy who was in town for the Berlin film festival which wraps up in a few days. He told me he worked in film and that he used to live in Berlin but had to move due to the weather. I asked him how long he had lived here and he told me three months. What a brittle ass spirit, I thought. I guess you should all check back with me in three months to see if I’m similarly brittle. We talked about famous directors, particularly Werner Herzog and Fassbinder.

After dinner I went out to meet an Australian bartender friend I made, who introduced me to another bartender and some of his friends. He arrived in Berlin at the same time as me. Predictably, we stayed out until the wee hours of the morning telling stories and drinking proper German beer before calling it a night. This did not help my sinuses, which were misbehaving and filling up like hot air balloons with snot and pus. Walking into a German drugstore is a unique experience. They carry over the counter drugs, but they are behind the counter and you must interface with a pharmacist who speaks broken English to explain your symptoms before they will hand you something.

"It burns when I pee," I told him.

"Vhat?"

"Umm, my pee pee," I started, pointing to my Netherlands, "it's fuego when I, uh, ppppsssssssss."

"Dis ist not goot."

"Ja. I know. But, no, really, my sinuses are killing me and I've got more goo coming out of my nose than a pornstar on a bukake set."

After going back and forth like this for some time, he handed me a nasal spray with eucalyptus in it and a package of pills that are half ibuprofen and half pseudoephedrine. I've been snorting fiery eucalyptus like a cracked-out koala ever since. On the bright side, I locked in an apartment today. I hesitated a lot about signing the contract because it requires a two-year minimum lease. Now, that's about the time I was planning on staying here anyway - so it should be fine - but everyone has informed me what a commitment 2 years is. I lived in my previous apartment for 6 years - I don’t have commitment issues. I deliberately selected an apartment here that's optimally located so that I won’t need to move again anytime soon, barring any unforeseen circumstances, of course. If my health goes to shit, or the company goes belly up, or I get fired, then I likely won’t have a choice but to terminate the contract early, and at great cost (if I can't find a replacement tenant). This is a risk, certainly. But the housing market in Berlin is fiercely competitive, somehow much more so than even San Francisco. My status as an outsider, lacking the ability to speak the native language, and also lacking any meaningful German financial history, puts me at a sizable disadvantage when apartment hunting. There comes a time when you have to take what you can get. Once I’ve established myself, and I’ve proven to be a reliable tenant and debtor, then I can reevaluate whether I want to remain in Berlin in my existing flat or move somewhere else. It's hard to explain just how difficult it is to get a callback for an apartment here. Often, when attending a viewing, there are 30 other people there, all of them trying to engage in convivial talks with the agent. I've heard stories of lines forming out of the apartment all the way down onto the street. Other times the real estate agent will agree to meet but never show. What I mean to say with all of this is: I had little choice in my choice. The apartment is nice, clean, recently renovated, nicely located and seems quiet. The price is slightly more than I wished to pay, but it is clear that the great deals were not going to come my way. Flats are on the market for several hundred dollars less, but they are typically missing kitchens or not as ideally located or are situated directly over a storefront on a noisy street etc., and these go quickly to those with German citizenship and squeaky clean SCHUFA reports.


I'll end with an absurd thing I witnessed the other day. As I was walking towards my temporary flat by Alexanderplatz, I came upon three hotdog venders standing in close proximity to one another. At first, I thought the chance coincidence of three competing vendors gathered together seemed not only odd, but wonderfully photogenic - so much so that I cursed myself for not having brought my camera - but as I approached them I noticed they were looking at each other rather stiffly. Well, as stiffly as they could; the hotdog vendors here are ridiculously outfitted, wearing suspenders that hoist an entire grilling apparatus housed in cheap looking plastic around their waists. Over their heads, there is a rectangular shade structure which instead of a traditional umbrella, looks more like an awning. So here I am, coming up on some commotion that is starting to simmer. By their hurried, lilting exchanges, I can tell the men are Italian. They parry back and forth in little bursts that sound almost operatic. People on the street begin to take notice. One of the hotdog men stands idle and watches the other two bicker, unsure of where his allegiance lies, while they continue argue and flail their arms around antagonistically. One of the men seems more upset than the other. I can’t understand what they are saying, but the combination of the scene’s increasing tension and their comical appearance has everyone on the street smiling. I slow my pace so I can see more of the action. As I am parallel to them I can tell they are almost ready to come to blows, and then, based on the look of astonishment on the one man's face, it’s clear that the other had said something intolerable. In an outburst of unbridled fury, the hotdog man retaliated by smashing his body against the other hotdog man’s body, causing the rickety plastics on their midsections to collide fiercely. With high-pitched Italian invectives they begin to mash themselves together, the hotdogs in their transparent stomachs bounce around like unfastened bodies in a car crash. What better show of bravado, what better dick-measuring contest than two men literally thrusting at one another with bellies full of frankfurters that jostle around like lubed up dildos?

Berlin is great.

NY > BER

What’s there to say about New York that hasn’t already been said? It’s the greatest city in the world — and everyone who lives there is very fond of saying so. It only took two days for me to remember its seductive appeal, and then another ten to exhaust it. Now, flying over the Atlantic Ocean, I think I’ve settled into subtle mourning. Saying goodbye to friends and family is always challenging, and it doesn’t get easier with time. Because, the older you get, the greater the likelihood is that this might be the last time you’ll see them. My parents are older than they were when I first left New York seven years ago, somehow much more so.

For most of my time in New York, 20th and 1st avenue was my home. My friend Nicole generously offered up her mattress so that I could crash with her. She told me she’d love it if I stayed there the whole time and encouraged me tirelessly to abandon my previous plans of spending a few days with her cousin, Alphonse (known also as Ralphie). Each night she coaxed me into compliance by tempting me with episodes of Seinfeld or Twin Peaks, and plying me with liberal portions of wine. Because I was taking antibiotics I couldn’t drink much, but that didn’t stop her. It didn’t stop anyone, actually. She and her roommates seemed to be hosting AA meetings not for recovering alcoholics, but for relapsing ones. Every night was a party, even on the mellow nights. On one particular Tuesday, as I came up the elevator about to stumble into the apartment, I caught the familiar smell of McDonald’s wafting out from under the door. Because I didn’t have a key - and wasn’t allowed one - each time I arrived at her place I had to gamble on the door at the bottom of the building being open. It was one of those doors that required a key-fob. Luckily the building was moderately busy, which allowed me to gain entry most times with relative ease. So each night I’d return to the entrance like a divorced vampire with visitation rights, hoping the previous invitation hadn’t been revoked, and I’d slip through the main door and take the elevator up to the apartment. To get through her door required one final step, involving a 4-digit combination lock. On this particular night, because I had been drinking, and because it was late, I was especially distracted while entering the combination and began fumbling. The lock clanged loudly against the door as I muttered and continued to make errors due to my agitation. Big Mac fumes swirled all around me. I started whimpering like an unwalked dog. Why was no one rushing to my aid!? Finally, preposterously hunched over the doorknob, sweating, salivating, I entered the code correctly and the lock fell to pieces all over the floor. Hastily, I picked it up and placed the key into the door. When I opened it I found Nicole sitting in a daze on the couch, dressed in a tank top and a pair of blue shorts with Big Mac sauce smeared all over her face. Crumbs from the french fries were scattered over her shirt and had infested her shorts. An overturned box of wine, now empty, had become a footrest. Quickly, I touched the Big Mac to see if it was still warm. It was. So I snatched it right out of her grubby, lifeless little hands and bit into it. Without thinking, I went to the fridge, grabbed a nearly expired bottle of Hunt’s ketchup and squirted it all over her tank top in a smiley face fashion so that I could dunk the fries in. I ate all of the remaining fries, and her 5-piece nuggets before she woke up.

“Daaaaaannnnn!” Nicole yelled.

Yeah?

“You’re home!”

Yeah!

“How are you?”

I’m good, I told her.

“You hungry? Have some food!”

I can’t, I said...I’m stuffed.

“Okay.”

Then I sneezed.

“Daaaannn!”

Yeah?

“...I’m sad.”

Why? Because I just sneezed?

“No, Dan.”

I wondered if she could tell I ate her french fries.

“Because I...wait...is there fucking ketchup on my shirt?”

Yeah, you must’ve fallen asleep while you were eating the fries.

“Damnit!”

Here, let me get you a tissue for the Big Mac sauce.

“Fuck the sauce! I’m saving it for later.”

Okay.

“Daannnnnn!”

....

“Daaaaaannnnnnnn!!”

And it went on like this until sleep took her somewhere around 3AM. Invariably she’d wake noisily in the predawn hours and shatter an empty glass of wine or stub her toe against a misplaced shoe on the way to the bathroom. She was an inexhaustible source of alarm clock mayhem. “Great,” she said one morning, “now I have to go to work and hold babies. Why am I like this?” I told her it was because her mother accidentally smoked crack while she was pregnant...

I left Nicole’s towards the end of my trip to give her and her roommates their space back. A whole new series of adventures would await me in Sunnyside, at Alphonse’s..

[Jesus, I need to write an aside here. As I type, wakened from a meager in-flight slumber which I struggled (but failed) to maintain for the last 6 hours, the German girl beside me has taken to violent, patient-zero level fits of coughing. There is absolutely no doubt in my mind that whatever respiratory illness she has will be passed onto me and the guy beside me. Each time she coughs, which is many times a minute, the man on my left leans forward to glare at her as though his Medusa-like gaze might turn her germs to stone. Unfortunately for me, I just sneezed. It’s too late for me. An amazing biological phenomenon happens when you are trapped with someone who is ill and infectious on a plane. It must be an old, very primal, hardwired survival instinct causing these thoughts, but I find myself wanting to destroy her. Because I am unable to distance myself from her tuberculosis-ridden body, each time she hacks bubbling mucus around in her windpipe I want nothing more than to crush it. The village caretaker in me wants to stop the spread of that plague, pronto. It wants to save the healthy. The needs of the many outweigh the needs of the few. Pecking order. Ok, I think she’s finally coughed herself unconscious. Back to the regularly scheduled program.]

New York. No shortage of places to eat and drink. Even though I was severely limiting my alcohol intake - to no more than 2 drinks on any given day - I still managed to find myself in more bars and restaurants than I could count. Part of this is because I can only count to the number 7. Someone told me it was lucky. On one of my last nights out in the city, Nicole’s cousin Alphonse had recommended I take a trip to Brooklyn to see the second incarnation of a favorite bar of mine, called Elsa. The bar was originally located on the lower east side but had closed down sometime after I’d moved. To my surprise, after 7 years it had been reborn, this time in Brooklyn. The aesthetic of the bar was similar; elegant, clean, minimalist, wooden, candles, dim lighting. Serving up a variety of well-crafted cocktails, Elsa was a proper blast-from-the-past and provided a lubricated launching pad for great discussion. We focused on only the most vexing philosophical questions, the ones that have plagued thinkers for millennia. For instance; imagine a situation in which a man and a woman are fucking. During coitus, a queef is heard. I ask you: who is the queefer, who is the queefee? Can such labels be applied here? To complicate the situation further, imagine two men having sex to produce the same sound. Is it a fart, or a queef!? At some point the conversation moved toward farting, and the concept of being able to flatulate at will. Alphonse took the opportunity to bestow upon us this nugget of wisdom:

“Well, I can’t speak for everyone, and I can’t just make myself fart, but if I feel like I have to fart, if there’s a real need for it, I can fart.”

Thanks Alf.

During Nicole’s Ted Talk on obesity in America, she said, “he’s not obese, he’s just fat, but he looks like he’d be fun to eat with.”

There was also a moment of vulnerability where I self-reported as being shy. My friends, in smug agreement, determined this to be untrue and told me that not only was I not shy, but that I loved to talk. I explained that this simply wasn’t so, that I only talk with those I am already very comfortable with, and usually at great cost with respect to energy. Once more they claimed the contrary. I protested, but it was in vain: they had achieved a mob mentality. Talking, I went on to explain, is an inherently social phenomenon - it is done to connect with and communicate to others. “But you can talk to yourself,” they said, “so it isn’t always social.” Talking to yourself isn’t social, I told them. In fact, we generally consider people who talk to themselves to be mentally ill. To talk, conversationally, requires more than one party: there is a speaker and a listener. They told me that because you can talk to yourself, talking with others is basically the same. Perhaps by this same logic my friends prefer masturbation to sex..

At some point late in the night, around 4 in the morning, a debate had erupted about the possibility of implanting prosthetic testicles inside the scrotums of newly neutered dogs. Yusaku tried firmly to denounce the idea of false balls, but proponents of this wild conspiracy theory would not be so easily dismissed. Allegedly, the procedure is so common, that 1 in 3 dog balls are believed to be decoys. We had been playing cards for untold hours by now and a few of our guests had ingested several tabs of marijuana - a combination that can sometimes be fatal when mixed with sleep deprivation. I thought it best to conclude the conversation with an earnest plea: can everyone please shut the fuck up about Snoopy’s sack?!

Ah, I forgot to mention the Hitchcockesque thing that happened to me as I was staying with Alphonse. It was on the first morning I'd arrived there. He'd informed me in advance that he had prior obligations during the day, and told me to make myself at home. I had some errands to run also, so this was to work out beautifully. Before he left, and after we visited his sister just two floors below, I asked that we make a quick trip to the hardware store for a set of keys so that I could get in and out of the apartment in his absence. The hardware store was long and narrow, and there was a big black dog inside that sniffed relentlessly at my pantlegs. It seemed to take a long time for the Asian store owner to duplicate the keys. I wondered if he was using a copying machine or if he was doing it the old fashioned way and forcing the keys to fuck. After the keys were made Alphonse and I parted ways. I went to meet my parents for lunch in Bayside and then made my way back to take a quick nap before going out. I had been feeling a bit under the weather for some reason and so I welcomed the chance to sleep. I got off at Lowery Street and walked left from the station to Alf's. The sky seemed grayer than it had been in Bayside. My feet felt heavier, too. Cold wind beat against the bare trees, whistling as it went. I arrived at the familiar red awning, opened the glass door and walked through the vestibule toward the door where I would use the first key. The key slid in but when I tried to turn it nothing happened. Odd, I thought, wondering if there might be a problem with the key. Turning it the other way, I retried. No luck. Perhaps there was a problem with the door. I applied pressure to it while turning the key in case something was misaligned, but no go. Inside was a Hispanic custodian with headphones on cleaning the glass mirrors in the lobby. He glanced at me while I tried and retried the door with a Sisyphean zeal. What else was I to do? Sensing my frustration, the man came and opened the door for me. Thanks. Is there something wrong with the door, I asked? Nope, it's been working fine all day. I thanked him again and walked up the stairs. Maybe the guy at the hardware store had given me a bad copy of the key - I'd have to go back later.

I took the stairs to the fourth floor and rummaged absentmindedly through my pockets for the second key. It slid in and but turned only 3/4 of the way. You've got to be kidding me. Two bad keys? This time there would be no janitor to bail me out, so I did what anyone would do and kept retrying the key. What were the odds of two bad keys? Well, if they fucked up one it's possible they fucked up the other. I started to notice how oddly quiet everything was. When I'd come to the building earlier this morning there was a dog in the neighboring apartment that had gone wild and wouldn't stop barking, but I didn't hear a thing now. I looked at the door: 4D. No, that was correct. I took out my phone to confirm I wasn't losing my mind and saw that the text from Alf had indeed said apartment 4D. I tried the door two more times and then texted him. He told me he'd be a while, to go down to the 2nd floor and get a key from his sister. So I walked down the two flights to his sister's door but it looked slightly different from how it did earlier. I couldn't put my finger on what it was, but I could tell immediately, even before I'd gotten up close to it. I eyed it up and down and then realized the hola! welcome mat was missing. Maybe she was cleaning it? From inside the apartment music was playing, as if someone was having a party. It didn't strike me as the kind of music that his sister would listen to, but her fiancé lived there as well and I was unfamiliar with his musical tastes. I knocked on the door and heard someone approach from the other side. Who is it, she asked. It didn't sound like Leonor, but I couldn't tell through the door and over the music.

Hey, it's me, I need Alf's key.

No response.

Leonor?

Someone turned down the music. Who is it, the voice asked? No, it definitely wasn't Leonor. Maybe a friend was over and answering the door while Leo was out or in the bathroom?

Hey, uh, is Leonor home?

Who?

Leonor.

No answer.

I heard the eerie metal-on-metal sound of the peephole opening up. Who are you? It was then I realized, inexplicably, that I was at the wrong door.

Sorry, I said, I must have the wrong apartment and hurriedly started walking away. I could feel a greasy eye on me as I approached the stairs.

What do you want, the voice said.

I ignored it and raced down the stairs to the lobby, questioning my sanity.

How is it possible that both keys were bad and that Leonor wasn't in the apartment she was supposed to be in? Could I have been in the wrong building? Everything about the building was exactly as I had remembered it. Come to think of it, the name on 4D wasn't Alf's. But he hadn't been in this apartment very long - maybe he hadn't changed it yet. Was his attention to detail so keen that he would have even noticed, or cared? Really, once someone is in the building and knows you're located at 4D, does it even matter? I never put my name on the mailbox of my apartment in San Francisco and I lived in that building for six years. The only logical explanation was that I was in a wrong but somehow identical building. I walked outside to get some air, unsure of what I would do next, but when I looked to my left I saw the adjacent building had an identical red awning. Well, that explains it. I had been in a wrong but identical building. When I arrived at the vestibule of the next building though, as I was reaching for the key, I saw inside the lobby the same man who was washing the glass of the other building. For a moment I felt an incredible pressure moving in all around me while I watched the exact same scene playing out in front of me in the exact same way it had in the previous building. My sanity seemed like a thin piece of crystal about to shatter. I put the key in, unsure of what was about to happen, and turned it. The door opened. The Hispanic man saw me and took one headphone out to address me.

Wrong building, he asked?

Yeah.

I thought so, he said. They're identical.

Yeah.

Really does your head in, he said.

Yeah.

It's Been Real

This last week in San Francisco has been wonderful. The weather, which can be grey, dull and damp in January, has been cheerful and sunny. Yesterday, it was warm enough to go outside in a t-shirt, wearing no jacket. Clear skies have presided - not a cloud in sight. When the winter chill mixes with warm sun at this time of year, it reminds me of fall in New York. Walking on the shady side of the street is slightly too cold and walking in the sun, if the wind isn’t blowing, is warm enough to work up a sweat. All around me there seems a stillness, a sort of calm which wraps itself around me during this semi-hectic transition. My last day in San Francisco is today. Everything has been surreal since I’ve returned from Australia, but today feels especially unreal. It started last night, when I left my apartment to empty a jar of loose change at the supermarket down the street. From where I live at Lone Mountain there is a lovely view of the skyline downtown, and because the street to the market faces east, at sunset the city shimmers gently as the sun sinks into Ocean Beach in the opposite direction. The air behind the skyscrapers had a chalk-dust quality, full of pale blues and soft lavender that haunted the spines of the buildings there. Incredibly, an enormous full moon had perched itself atop the almost fully constructed Salesforce Tower like a giant scoop of glowing ice-cream on a cone. The pairing of the colors and the size of the moon and the temperature of the air and the quiet of a usually busy street came together to create an overwhelmingly dreamy sensory experience. I stopped walking and just stared in awe as the lower crest of the moon kissed the top of the building while it withdrew and rose inertially to its proper place in the sky. Never had there been a more beautiful moonrise. It was only today that I discovered last night’s moon was a super blue blood moon; a parting gift from San Francisco.

I've spent the week seeing friends, saying goodbyes, shipping a few personal items across the globe, and selling things on Craigslist at painfully steep discounts. No matter how reasonably priced an item is listed on Craigslist, potential buyers will haggle relentlessly and make laughably insulting offers. Selling my valued possessions at severe losses has been an eye-opening experience. From now on everything I purchase will be stolen, or bought from a thrift store, or, better yet, stolen from a thrift store. I've learned my lesson.

Because today is my last day, there are some remaining loose ends to tie up. My couch will need to be cast out to the sidewalk, as will my bed. Some remaining items will undoubtedly be gifted to the gutter. The last of my bottles of wine will need to be transported to a friend’s house. Speaking of friends, The Profuser came by last night. We spent our time together talking of all the good times which inevitably led to the end of an era. He graciously took a bunch of miscellaneous paraphernalia, as well as my stash of illicit substances which I kindly asked him to use as suppositories if he was considering ingesting any of them in my absence. During dinner, he, like many of my friends, spread a liberal layer of guilt over me, citing my supreme selfishness for moving to Germany. We spoke of what the true motivator for such an expression is: sadness; at losing the company of a close friend. There is a unique quality to leaving San Francisco. It is qualitatively different than when I left New York, though I cannot easily explain why. Maybe because San Francisco has been the first place I've truly felt at home. It is where I've spent nearly all of my adult life - assuming one becomes an adult only at the ripe age of 25. I'd be lying if I didn't say there is some sadness associated with the move, but there isn't enough of it to deter me. In some ways leaving is like a little death; as though somehow able to attend my own funeral, I am privy to the eulogies of those who knew me best, getting to listen to the tender expressions of love and appreciation, mournful regrets, and the heartfelt devotion of true friendships. I will miss all of them.

But, fear not dear readers! I will rise from throes of death like our lord and savior Jesus Christ, much to the shock of my disbelieving disciples. I will write sordid tales of love and glory from Hitler’s bunker, hidden deep in the subterranean intestines of east Berlin. New words will pepper these pages, words like Schieße and ficken. This site will take on a far more cultured and cosmopolitan tone once I’m living as an expat in Europe. Perhaps a more fitting name is in order, to signify this crucial change in affect. From this day forward, the cite will be renamed große Fürze.

Until then, tschüss.