Alive! (For now)

 

I'm still among the land of the living, for now anyway. The possibility of a delayed onset complication doesn't elude me. I'll wait until my first bowel movement so I can check for any excessive blood before declaring I'm in the clear. This was a bizarre, once (I hope) in a lifetime experience. I had planned to take the subway to the doctor's office, but because my colon was still emptying when I should have been leaving my apartment, I had to take an Uber. The driver got me there just in time, at a minute after 8:30. Since last night I'd been a bit frantic because I accidentally drank unstrained chicken broth after starting the laxatives. This meant very small bits of spices and seasoning would have likely made their way into my otherwise pristine intestines. A sudden jolt of fear gripped me when I realized what I'd done.

Fuck, I said out loud. I was incredulous. How had I made such a mistake after taking pains to properly strain the first glass? At the time my mind was all over the place with stress. I had been speaking to an old friend on the phone who was on his way to the airport to catch a flight from JFK to Utah. This proved a sufficient distraction for the error to occur. In fact, I didn't even notice I'd done it until I had hung up the phone, gone inside, gone to the bathroom, and gone back to the kitchen to continue drinking. Once I held the cup to my eyes in better light I saw I'd forgotten to strain the bits from the pot.

Google revealed others had made similar absentminded blunders, but I couldn't determine conclusively whether this would nullify the entire colonoscopy. Would my intestinal tract be littered with small pieces of debris which would interfere with the scope? Presumably this would increase the risk of complications such as a perforation since the doctor would need to maneuver around them, right? There was no one to call - it was already past 8pm - so I turned to Reddit. The consensus was that it should be okay, but no one was willing to say this with certainty. So when I arrived at the office this morning I brought the powdered broth with me to show to the doctor. 

Everything was okay. 

Phew. The thought of having to go through the prep again within a week or two made my insides quiver. They directed me to a chair behind a curtain where I was instructed to remove my shoes, clothes and underwear, and put on a pair of shorts which had a large flap open on the backside. They looked comical, clownish even. I asked the nurse if she could take a photo of me wearing them. She said she was going to take plenty of photos, I just wouldn't be awake for them. Jokes aside, the nurses were very nice. They did a great job at distracting me and setting my mind at ease with their demeanor alone. They led me to an adjacent room and laid me down on a table where I was hooked up to an IV and a pulse oximeter. The other nurse put an oxygen tube in my nose. Soon the doctor arrived. This is where things got strange.

He told me something in German, but the only word I understood was dreams. 

So I said, "I didn't catch all of that, but you're wishing me good dreams?"

The anesthesiologist translated and confirmed. 

"Okay, but I don't feel very sleepy and the drug was administered two minutes ago. The last time I was asleep within a few seconds."

The anesthesiologist said yes, you should be sleeping, hold on. So she pushed more propofol into my vein. Nothing. I looked at her quizzically. It was burning slightly. I wonder if it was somehow blocked. She pushed more of the drug into my vein. It was at this moment that I saw my hairy asshole on the TV screen.

"Wait a minute," I started, looking over the shoulder towards the doctor, "shouldn't we wait until I'm asleep to start?"

You'll be asleep any second, he told me, as he pressed a lubed up thumb into my conscious anus. I made a protesting groan of discomfort in response. He was right: I felt like I was drifting, but not fast enough. I turned back toward the anesthesiologist who looked on at me with pity. Her eyes seemed to say, I'm sorry. In my half dreaming, delusional state I looked over at the TV as the camera snaked its way deeper into my anal cavity. I was mesmerized. This was trippier than anything I'd ever seen at Burning Man. My colon was clean, shiny and well-illuminated, and it was on display in 4K for the world to see. There were no seeds or grains and, to my surprise, no chicken broth seasoning. Clean and wet as a whistle. I tried to say something but noticed my vocal cords weren't responsive. Somehow I was able to muster a feeble groan to signify I was still awake and could feel the device slithering up into my stomach, but no one paid me any mind. For a moment I slipped into unconsciousness but then I was back a few seconds later. More visages of my colon floated by as I felt myself disassociating from my body. I saw her give one last press of the 240mg of propofol into my bloodstream and then I was gone. Some time later I was being walked back to my bed in the room with the curtains.

I laid there for a few minutes, not quite dreaming, not quite awake, trapped in that pleasant and perpetual state of ease and timelessness one feels in between alarm snoozes. Soon a new nurse, but also a familiar one, appeared. She had helped me on Wednesday. I explained to her that I wasn't fully asleep, that I had 'witnessed my own asshole.' I tried to communicate what it was like to simultaneously watch the penetration but also experience it. When she asked me how I was feeling I told her I felt okay, but that I wasn't as drowsy or incapacitated as I've been in the past under similar circumstances, that'd I'd be on my feet in no time. She went to bring me a cup of green tea and I got dressed while she was gone. She was surprised to see me fully clothed and upright. 

"Can I eat the banana I brought?" I asked.

Sure.

"Ah, also, is it okay if I wipe the goo from my ass? I brought my own wipes. Can I dispose of them in this bin?"

Yes.

"Perfect."

I cleaned myself up a bit and waited for the doctor. When he entered he told me everything was fine, that there was no inflammation or blood or signs of cancer. I asked him if there were any polyps because I was reading on the paper that one biopsy had been made. He told me no. He seemed to be in a hurry. He was gone as soon as he came. The nurse reappeared and she handed me a report to give to my house doctor. On this report it also mentioned a polyp was found.

"Hey, one question. Was a polyp sent for biopsy, because I just asked the doctor and he said no but on both pieces of paper I've seen it looks like there was."

"Hmm, that's strange" she said, "yes, a polyp was removed. We're sending it to the lab and they should have the results sent to your doctor within a week."

"Weird. I wonder why he said there were no biopsies made. Maybe he misunderstood me?"

"No, that would be strange," she said.

I agreed. We both awkwardly shrugged.

They called me a cab and I left.

Remember

 

Yesterday I spent half of my day at different doctor's offices. In the morning a gastroenterologist and in the evening a dentist. The dentist appointment I've had since the beginning of the month. The gastro appointment I scored suddenly, the evening before last. I jumped at the opportunity because it's so difficult to get seen in Berlin. At the time of booking I was even even able to secure an appointment for a colonoscopy on Monday. When I arrived at the office the neighborhood was nice and the receptionist at the front desk was pleasant and accommodating. She told me they just had an appointment open up for Friday if I wanted to get things over and done with sooner. I deliberated a bit, unsure which I preferred. 

"Having it on Monday gives me the weekend to mentally prepare, " I said.

"Yes. Having it sooner gets it out of the way and allows you to enjoy your weekend," she replied.

This was true. After a minute of weighing my options, I decided to just get it done with and take the appointment for Friday. She handed me a bunch of documents to read and sign and so I sat down in the waiting room and began reading. One series of documents was for the procedure itself, and the other was for the general anesthesia. Both documents are the stuff of nightmares. They describe in detail the various ways things can go wrong, from perforations to hemorrhages to deadly infections. I could feel the tension rising in my neck and shoulders. On one page there was mention that patients should avoid eating grains, seeds, fruit and vegetables for the week leading up to the examination. That morning I had my typical breakfast: a bowl of oatmeal with blueberries, strawberries, kiwis, hemp seeds, chia seeds, dried fruit and nuts, almond butter - all of the things I am to avoid. When I returned to the front desk I explained that maybe it would be better to move the procedure back to Monday since I'd have the procedure in less than 48 hours and I already did what it says I shouldn't. She said that this was okay, that as long as that was my last meal containing these foods that it should be fine. 

"One other thing I'm cautious about," I continued, "it says if bleeding occurs the next day it is important to return immediately for evaluation. I imagine you're closed on Saturday, right?"

She said yes, and told me I should go to a hospital in that case. I was still hesitant. She said I could speak to the doctor and get his opinion. So I did. When I spoke with the doctor he also indicated that this shouldn't be a problem. 

"Okay, I hear you, but why does it explicitly state on this document you're asking me to sign that I am to abstain from eating these foods for the week before the procedure? It also says these rules are especially important beginning two days before the procedure, which is today. Maybe it's better to wait until Monday?"

Once more he told me that in his opinion things should be fine. 

A strange thing happens in these situations when one finds himself at odds with professional expertise and reason. The reasonable side of me felt waiting was the better choice since it reduces the chance of complications. The side of me consulting a doctor for his opinion told me to relax and trust him. I wrestled with myself and chose trust over skepticism. But even now I'm unsure whether this was correct. From what I've been reading there are mixed views. Some professionals say it's fine, while others adhere to the rules strictly. One study suggested current dietary restrictions for colonoscopies are too restrictive, claiming patients could eat things like eggs and yogurts before the exam without issue. Researchers found patients feel better when they're properly nourished and not feeling weak and hungry. This is sensible to me, but I'm no doctor. As a patient I do recall how I felt leading up to the last colonoscopy I had and it was pretty awful. I'm not looking forward to starting the prep here in a few hours.

At the moment I already feel slightly nauseous. It's unclear whether this is due to stress or the dental work I had done last night. My appointment was for 17:15 and I was under the impression it would just be a quick and painless routine. They were to put fillings on the front of my teeth where my gums have receded because of nighttime teeth grinding. Somehow I understood this would be as simple as applying nail polish. When I sat down in the chair and saw an assortment of polishing instruments and other objects - the purposes of which were unclear to me - I began to realize I may have been mistaken. Once the needles came out, I was certain of it. The operation took over an hour as the dentist and her assistant treated five of my front teeth. It involved fastening a set of rubber clamps to the place where my gums met my tooth on each of the five teeth. Then a filling agent was applied. It had to be hardened, scrubbed, sanded and polished to approximate the color and texture of the lower half of the tooth further down from the gumline. The novocaine wore off in the middle and they had to keep reinjecting me to stop the intense stabbing pain. My jaw was spasming and quivering like a mad dog's. I struggled to even hold it open by the end. Finally, once it was all over, they handed me a mirror. 

I felt like Jack Nicholson in the start of the original Batman movie. My teeth were fine, my gums were caked with blood. When I rinsed, because the upper portion of the front of my lips were numb and paralyzed, all the water spilled out directly onto the crotch of my light blue jeans. Jesus I thought, why didn't anyone warn me I wouldn't be able to spit? I tried again, this time leaning deeper over the small sink, but this still resulted in dribbling even more water out onto my crotch. Now it really looked like I'd pissed myself. They stuffed my upper lip with gauze to absorb some of the blood and sent me on my way. Between my swollen lip, bleeding mouth, big frizzy beard, piss-stained pants and my inability to speak, I looked like a legitimate, bonafide crack head. I made the walk of shame to the subway and headed home to meet my friend who would soon join me. When he saw me he must have thought I got my ass kicked. He didn't say it, but it was in the eyes.

I awoke at 6:40 this morning because my mouth was dry and my lips were sticking to the tender area where the dental work had been done. My stomach feels queasy and I'm not sure if it's from stress or swallowing whatever traces of blood and chemicals they put on my teeth during the filling. I feel like I'm about to have diarrhea and I haven't even taken the laxative yet. I know it's important to keep a positive mental attitude, and I'm trying, but man does this feel like an ordeal. Part of me honestly believes I'm going to die either during or after the procedure and I'm almost reckoning with my mortality, trying to see where I need to make amends before it's too late. The sad part is I don't have enough time. I'm working today. Later, I'll begin drinking this horrid drink and I'll be glued to the toilet for the remainder of the evening. Which reminds me: I only have one roll of toilet paper left. I'll need to go to the store during my lunch break. I am to wake up at 4AM and drink some more laxative, reacquaint myself with the toilet, and arrive for the colonoscopy by 8:30. 

What space is there to tie up a life's loose ends?

What would I say to those I've known and loved if I could eke out one final salutation? Do they know I love them all? Of course they do, right? That I'm grateful for their friendship and for having known them? For the memories we've made? What about my family? Are they aware that I'm thankful for the good times and the bad? In truth it's the bad times that seem to really shape us. I hope my parents know I don't resent them for the bad times, for their mistakes, any moments of meanness or failure. They were only human, tasked with a responsibility fit for a God. I believe people are always doing the best they can. People are imperfect, flawed, error prone...myself included. We must seek understanding where we can, and find the strength to forgive. We punish too much, ourselves most of all. 

What would I say to Asia? The thought of her pain causes me a great deal. Did I do all I could to make her feel loved and appreciated? Was I a good partner to her? Would she forgive me for my imperfections and indiscretions? How would she remember me? These are heavy, heavy questions to contemplate. Perhaps too heavy for any extended length of time. One must breathe through these lines of inquiry or else succumb to a sort of spiritual suffocation. 

There's comfort in knowing your partner will move on and find new love, go on living their life without you. It's harder when you consider how your family would be changed; parents losing a child, a brother and sister losing one of their own. These wounds are deeper and longer lasting when you've known a person for the entirety of your life. The relationship is irreplaceable. With your siblings you've shared trauma, you have many of the same formative memories and core experiences. If you're lucky they are some of the closest friends you have. Over the years I've dreamt, on occasion, that one of them had died. Always the feeling of grief is overwhelming. The sorrow is so strong I would wake up from the dream with crying eyes, sobbing. It takes a few minutes for the feeling to part, and knowing it was only a dream doesn't seem to hasten away the feeling during those initial 120 mournful seconds. 

While I write this I see one of my cactuses has suddenly withered and died. This must have happened over the past few days. It was healthy when I watered it last week. Immediately my mind perceives this as a kind of omen. This thing was tenacious. I've had it the whole time I've lived in Berlin. It survived the pandemic when I was tucked away in Poland for several months and left it without water. Some of my other plants weren't as fortunate. There is still the other cactus, a small crassula in the kitchen, the orchid in the bathroom. All of them have been here almost as long. Somehow I thought this cactus to be the strongest of the bunch. I'll try not to read into it too much, but I am saddened by its passing.

For my transgressions I am sorry. If I've ever wronged you, or been unkind, I'm sorry. If I've ever dealt with you coldly, or carelessly, or without empathy or understanding, I am sorry. For judging you or condescending you or hurting you, I'm sorry. For any and all deliberate and unconscious cruelty, I am sorry. If there's one thing I'd want people to remember, or do in honor of me: be good to one another. This is no easy task. Life gets in the way. Each of us have our struggles and pains, fears and insecurities, and these things make us too much inside ourselves; we forget about the other. 

No one means to be mean, it is something done in confusion. All my experiences on psychedelics seem to have suggested as much anyway. We're all the same. All connected. At our disposal we have the capacity for great kindness and love. The choice is always there even when it seems forgone. Remember that. Summon kindness when speaking to someone who has views different than your own. Summon kindness for the person who cut you off in traffic, or for the person who was rude to you. Summon kindness for yourself. Practicing this makes us less angry, less entitled, less judgmental, more connected. These are things I'd like to work on, personally. Too often I find myself quick to anger or judgement even though I know this is not the way. We're all on a lifelong journey trying to learn how to be better. 

For some of us that journey is over sooner rather than later. Do not think you have more time than you do.

Why?

 

While doom scrolling Twitter today I came across the findings from the new IPCC report. For those of you not familiar with this report, it's a scientific research document which details the current state of the climate crisis and models humanity's trajectory to avoid a 2 degree celsius rise in temperature. Now, it doesn't take an official scientific report to tell us that the outlook is worse than grim. We're projected to overshoot 2 degrees by a large margin. To avoid this would require an immediate halt of fossil fuel consumption across a variety of sectors across the globe - a thing which our dominant economic model will not permit. There is too much money to be made in squeezing out the last drops of cash from coal, oil and the like. 

So what are we to do? World governments and news organizations are complicit in downplaying this emergency. If severity and urgency were any qualifiers for what makes a thing newsworthy, this story should be plastered all over every TV in every home in every country. Instead it doesn't rank in the top three stories being broadcast at the moment. How can a situation be meaningfully addressed if it isn't honestly communicated? Imagine a doctor not listing pancreatic cancer as one of her patient's top concerns, instead encouraging her to get better sleep and more regular exercise. The patient would go on thinking nothing is seriously wrong. No prompt action would be taken. This would be a death sentence.

Sadly, environmentalists and climate scientists have been sounding the alarm for decades and nothing aggressive enough has been done. Sure, the hole in the ozone layer was repaired, but that issue seems pretty inconsequential compared to what's in store. A multitude of tipping points have been identified. A number of them may have already been crossed. We will see cascading failures resulting in mass migrations, increased land and marine extinctions, warm acidified oceans, more wildfires and natural disasters, food supply chain instability and water scarcity to name a few. These increased pressures will result in more disputes over resources, lead to more war. Life is going to get a lot harder. We'll look back on these years with an incredulous fondness, wondering if it was real. Children will ask their grandparents questions like:

"Did you really have unlimited water on tap?"

"You were able to play outside in the middle of summer?"

"There used to be large sheets of ice keeping the earth cool?"

"Tell us about the Amazon rainforest."

"What happened to it?"

But the worst question of all will be: "Why didn't everybody try to stop it?"

Some people did try. They were ignored, ridiculed, threatened, discredited, killed. Rich and powerful companies and small groups of people with a lot of money used their influence to spread lies and confuse average citizens. They paid politicians to prevent governments from regulating them, and from taking any actions that would curb production and consumption because this would hurt their profits. You see, for some reason, people valued small rectangular pieces of paper more than the planet which give them a home.

"Why?"

New Computer, Who Dis?

 

The replacement MacBook arrived today. It's definitely an improvement over the previous model I'd ordered. Turns out doubling the RAM and adding nearly 10 extra cores to the GPU makes Stable Diffusion run much smoother. Who would have thought?! I'm excited to get started with the graphic novel. Sadly that won't happen until tomorrow. Tonight time ran away from me as I spoke with my mom. She's got Covid again. She's doing okay and is through the worst of it. She had it six months ago. Honestly I'm a bit surprised to hear she's got it again so soon. After that I spoke to the Profuser. He's doing well. He's become a gym rat. He works out in the gym for two hours each day trying to add more girth and bulk to his penis and balls. It's important to do this, he tells me, because as men age we produce less testosterone. If you don't work to beef up your meat, apparently it just withers away. Later I spoke to my sister who told me stories of what it's like to be a new dog owner. Dogs, when they are puppies, are notoriously non-compliant if treats are not involved. This surprises my sister for some reason. Tomorrow a dog trainer will visit her and offer some guidance, tips and tricks for treat giving.

Over the weekend Asia and I spent time with a mutual friend. He had two friends visiting, a couple from Hamburg. Lovely people. The guy was born in New York but has lived away from there for a decade now - the same as me. Coincidentally both of us now live in Germany and have European partners. Obviously this encourages a kind of kindred sensibility. Usually I tend to avoid other Americans while living abroad. Something about socializing with my own countrymen seems to defeat the purpose of moving across the ocean. This time was different though. We had much in common and it was pleasant to speak with someone with access to the same cultural iconography, history and base references. Two kids from New York. He was from Westchester, which technically isn't New York City, but it's close enough for me. I have a friend from Buffalo and I always give her shit that she's from the state of New York, not the city. I love her and miss her and hope she isn't reading this. 

We spent much of the weekend together, the five of us. All, miraculously, without drugs or alcohol. Well, that's not entirely true - there was some nibbling of cannabis containing cookies. But just a bit. The weather was spectacular, too warm for even a hoody. Spring seemed to have sprung as we paraded ourselves around Friedrichshain, ultimately terminating on the canal at the East Side Gallery. It was short-lived though, because Sunday brought with it grey skies, cooler temperatures, and rain. Meeting new people is nice, particularly when they come pre-vetted. Of course this isn't always the case. Sometimes you meet friends of friends and you just don't click, or worse, you loathe them. Luckily this wasn't the case. In fact, I've been lucky on several occasions this year meeting friends of friends. A few months back we met another couple, this time a Canadian and a German, who we also dabbled in the dark edible arts with. Maybe one day the whole big bunch of us can get together, like The Bradys.

Tomorrow morning I'll wake up early to get to the doctor's office before they open. I need a referral for a gastroenterologist. Back in December I was having some digestive problems. I probably mentioned that here. They've never completely cleared up so I want to get scoped. As someone with GERD, it's important to get checked out every so often, to make sure the stomach acids don't cause cell mutations in the esophagus. Not just that though, it's good to check out the lower GI tract too, where downstream issues may arise. It's been 5 years since I was last violated. It's time to celebrate that anniversary with another insertion. Part of me would like to forego the examination because it introduces new opportunity for tragedy. Even if the news is good and they find no suspicious polyps, no growths, no signs of warning, there's still the possibility of an adverse reaction, an error during the administration of anesthesia, an accidental perforation of the colon, a freak accident. While rare, these things do happen. We have to undergo these procedures and assure ourselves everything will be fine while simultaneously holding in our minds the knowledge that everything isn't always fine. Complications happen. Probability and statistics are things which cannot be reasoned with. Someone wins that lottery. You never want it to be you, but it is beyond your control. The same with riding planes. Yes, most planes don't crash. Driving in a car is more dangerous than flying, they say. But planes do sometimes crash. Anybody who ever got in a plane did so under the assumption that the plan would not crash - assuming of course they weren't planning on crashing it themselves. It is a gamble, one where the odds are stacked very much in your favor, but a gamble is still a gamble.

In a sense a colonoscopy adds unnecessary risk to your life. In another sense preventative testing allows for the early detection of a disease which would otherwise be fatal. It's a balancing act. All of life is. I just wonder. If I had to guess I'd say the survival rate for colorectal cancer is low. How much of a difference does catching it early make? How early must it be caught for that difference to be meaningful? Are there less intrusive tests with similar accuracy which could be used to make a diagnosis? 

I just wish it all weren't such a pain in the ass. 

The Devil You Know

 

Today I had the day off. My Einbürgerungstest was earlier this afternoon and it was important that this was the only task to complete. So much scheduling and studying and stress went into this event, it only felt fair to give it the proper respect. Under normal circumstances the process should be easier, but not in Berlin. The appointment for this test was made back in January. Back then I thought anyone could just sign up for an exam - that they were happening multiple times per week in multiple locations. This was naive. The bureaucracy in Berlin is legendary, and all the more challenging because it's in German. After emailing a dozen different people at half a dozen testing locations, making several phone calls, asking friends to make phone calls, and going in person to an office, it turned out that the soonest appointment I could get was two months away, in the middle of March. Even this wouldn't have been so bad if the test results were sent in a 20th century fashion. Instead, they are delivered in the Stone Age tradition of hammer and chisel, hand delivered within 6 - 8 weeks. Here's the problem: my appointment for permanent residency is at the end of April. Those results need to be in my hand before then. Currently there's a risk the results won't make it in time. 

What's fascinating about this whole situation is the exam is a 33-question multiple choice test. It took me under 10 minutes to complete. Over the past few weeks I had to memorize 310 questions to be certain I was familiar with all of them, but they only select a random subset of that number to quiz you on. Knowing this, how could it possibly take 6 - 8 weeks to grade? When we were kids in junior high school, we'd routinely have 50-question multiple choice exams, and we'd have our results the next morning, and there was only one teacher grading them. Granted, the tests could be fed into a Scantron machine and it would spit them right back out, marked and ready. But even in cases where a test had to be reviewed by hand, we'd never wait more than a few days. Not in Germany apparently. Oh well. What can be done?

Until this exam, I hadn't really studied since college. In school that's all you do. Go to class, listen, do the reading, write your essays, do your homework, study, test, repeat. My whole life I was always a good test taker. Most of the time I didn't need to study very long, if it all. Now that I'm older, my brain requires a little more encouragement than it used to. Some of that could be chalked up to studying in a language I don't really understand - something I've mentioned here in a previous post - but another part of it comes from the fact that as an adult you don't really study for things after university. No one tests you anymore. People would be smarter or more well read if they did. Imagine in order to keep your job you had to take a test once a quarter which proved you've been keeping up with all the changes in your field, the new developments, advancements, corrections, buzzwords, key concepts and respected thought leaders? Many of us, I'd venture, would be better at our jobs. Or lose them. The lack of vigorous intellectual exercise, I think, is a significant contributor to cognitive degeneration and decline as a person ages. If we aren't challenged to think or to integrate new information into our worldviews, those views become rigid, the mind less curious, closed. It begins to feel more comfortable digging our heels into what we already think we know. Look at any old boomer.

I'm just glad the test is over and done with. I'm fairly confident I passed with a perfect score. The only thing that worries me is the large and credible risk of not getting the certificate in time for the permanent residency appointment. I'll just need to manifest that with positive vibes, I guess. Each day I'll imagine the results arriving in the middle of April, or sooner, so that by the time the date rolls around it's been so thoroughly charged by my good intentions it has no choice but to appear in my mailbox. Starting now I'll have time to redirect my focus back to finishing the graphic novel, or learning Polish. Asia got me a book: Polish for Dummies. I'm trying not to read too hard between the lines on that one.

For some reason my stomach is in shambles today. Gas, bloating, loose stool. In the middle of the exam I thought there was going to be a bomb scare. Knotted waves and ghastly gurgling started rippling through my midsection as I left my apartment for the test. When I messaged Asia she suggested it was nerves. But it wasn't. I felt completely at ease. I'd given myself ample time to study and practice for this. Yesterday I took over 10 practice exams, and on each one I received a perfect score. There was no worry there. Something else was going on in my stomach. I've been feeling sick for the past few days now. It started with a mild sore throat, a headache, then graduated to fatigue, a cough, and now digestive issues. As a precaution I took a Covid test, but it came back negative. Not sure what I've got, but I'm hoping it clears up soon. I was looking forward to treating myself to a beer and pizza today, on account of getting the test out of the way, but instead, and as a compromise, I allowed myself a few spoons of ice cream. That's when I realized this year I haven't had beer, or pizza, or ice cream. 

What's the point of life without this holy trinity of sin?

-----

For most of human existence we've lived without beer, pizza and ice cream. Isn't that a terrible thought? Our ancestors, those utter savages, lived on seeds and nuts. What a time to be alive. As bad as this late-stage capitalist world is, at least  pizza, ice cream and beer are always a stone's throw away.

An Oldie

I found today's post in my drafts section. There's a bunch of them there. Some, particularly the posts which involve other people, I understand why I never published. But the one for today, I don't know. I guess it was just something I started and never finished. Clearly I was in a fiction phase. In order to really pull that off, you have to be reading regularly. Doing so gets you reacquainted with the movements and rhythms of writing. This is not to say that the blog I'm posting here is some masterpiece, far from it, but having read through it, it's better than anything I'd be able to spit out right now. I'm too out of practice. 

I'd been writing daily for nearly three years at that point, but as I said, I was also reading. To write well one must read well. I haven't had time for reading lately. After tomorrow's exam is out of the way I'll finish The Winter of Our Discontent and start something new. You need a good string of novels under your belt to start developing a knack for timing, phrasing, sentence construction and other, more advanced literary techniques. Reading also has the consequence of improving your vocabulary. I can sense, having been in Europe for too long, that my repertoire of words has contracted. There often isn't occasion for fancy words. That is, if you want to be understood. When you know your listener won't be familiar with a given word, you choose a simpler one. 

That's another thing reading teaches you: the importance of knowing your audience. Luckily for me, I don't have one.

----------

The metal felt cold against his hands. It had started to rain. He could see it blowing in the streetlights. After taking a breath he hoisted himself up and over the chainlink fence and began to run. In the distance behind him, footsteps splashed against the pavement. A flashlight jittered in the dark. Panting, he ran through an alley flanked on two sides by tall, decrepit looking buildings. Years ago they had been manufacturing plants, but when the market collapsed they laid off all their workers and shuttered the doors. Some of the windows were broken, bordered up, others bare. In time they became encampments for the homeless, for drug users, that was, until the gangs moved in. Those buildings had become prime real estate for the city's criminal contingent. Slowly, and with a mercilessly methodical insistence on eradicating the homeless population, cartels moved in and forcibly removed the property's unofficial inhabitants. Some were killed, others were beaten, others still were cleaned up and employed - once fealty was sworn to the new owners of the turf, of course. Rooms were repurposed for drug manufacture, converted into safehouses, weapons stores, harems.

The rain had turned wicked and buckets of it stormed down like waterfalls through drainage pipes. All the surfaces seemed to sweat and shine. Panting, Everett ran clutching his chest for breath, looking back every few seconds over his shoulder to see if his pursuers were still on his trail. Faintly he could see a jerky bit of light brightening the path behind him. He hadn't run like this since high school, when he was on the varsity football team, and it had been a long time since then. His entire body beat as if it were one giant human-shaped heart. Up ahead, around a corner, a drunken couple are fighting. I KNOW you gotta be fucking joking, the man says with slitted eyes and snarled lips, not trying to conceal his contempt, you think I'm fucking that bitch? She responds aggressively in the affirmative. How many times do I gotta tell you? I'm sick of this shit! You either trust me, or don't. 

She doesn't. 

THE FUCK YOU WITH ME FOR, THEN? His money, mainly, but also because he's handsome, and dangerous. But she doesn't know that; she thinks she loves him. At the moment she's hurt, angry, jealous and drunk. THEN WHY THE FUCK YOU WITH ME I SAID! She jabs her finger in his face and tells him not to talk to her like that. I'll talk to you however the fuck I want, he says, grabbing her hand by the wrist. With her other hand she smacks him.

Everett turns the corner just after he smacks her. She stumbles back and falls. The color of her red dress deepens as it drinks in the puddle on the ground. They both look at Everett. "Listen," Everett says, catching his breath, "I don't know what's going on, but we gotta go. Now." Who the fuck do you think you are coming in here and telling us what to do she says, getting up off the ground. I ain't about to take no shit from a little ass bitch like you she continues, aiming her frustration at a more conquerable foe. Who the fuck are you, the man asks. "I told you, we don't have time for this shit, they're coming," Everett replies, looking back over his shoulder as the approaching light. It's too close. Who's coming they both ask at the same time. Abandoning his effort, Everett charges past them and disappears through the glow of a swaying lantern dangling from a tangled knot of electrical wires. In a few moments he hears their screams, followed by a metallic scraping sound, and then the pop of dislocating bones. The footsteps follow after him.

From inside a third story window at the end of a dead end, a woman is smoking opium. She's gorgeous, with full lips and freckles, a small, softly sloping nose, big green eyes and long, layered hair. Standing in front of the window wearing only a black, white-collared kimono, she watches the rain fall. Smoke swirls around her and encases her in a diffuse haze that heightens her beauty. Her skin is taught over her bronze abdominals and the deep grooves of her iliac crest draw the eye downwards toward her long, well-muscled legs. She sits. Far off in the distance she hears sirens. Her mind roams as her eyes roll gently to the back of her head. The sirens become beautiful birdsongs made more resonant by the falling rain. She thinks she hears a knocking, but it cannot be. She expects no one. It is at precisely such moments however, that the most unexpected things happen. Her eyes refocus and she listens for the sound she swore she heard. Nothing. Then, outside, she hears the knocking of hurried feet against the wet ground. The shape of the alley always causes the sound to echo in a peculiar way. Looking through the window, she can see a running man. She puts her pipe on the windowsill as she leans forward and presses her face nearer to the fogging glass. It sends a dreamlike softness around what she sees.

The man, clearly distraught by the dead end, as indicated by the dejected slumping of his shoulders and his frantic turning about, looks up and sees her. Her eyes widen as she sees him see her see him. "HELP," he yells. At this point it's unclear to her whether this is real. Why would someone be in the alley? This is a dangerous place to come to. Spilling and sloshing about itself, her mind conjures images of her adolescence, when she suffered from bouts of sleep paralysis. Always it would be the same. She would wake, unable to move, unsure if what she saw and felt was a dream, and then the evil would come. It would move, as a shadow moves, unhindered by the dimensions of space and time, leaping from the floor to the wall to the ceiling in less than an instant, and then it would drip down like tar onto her chest. Terrified and mute she lie still as the terrible weight pressed against her and stole her breath. Only when she was sure she'd die, that no possible escape could be managed, would she finally wake up, gasping, trembling, panic stricken and afraid that she was not alone. Now, she felt that same loss of isolation, the same sense of voyeuristic trespass. "HELP," the man repeated. Help him from what, she wondered.

"READERS," he screamed. Her heart jumped soberingly up into her throat. "THEY'RE COMING," he yelled. Impossible. All the readers had been destroyed after the third world war. They were deemed too dangerous and decommissioned. During the war they had been an invaluable asset, due to their programmability. Built from the spare parts of cadavers, and implanted with an advanced artificial intelligence, they were virtually unkillable, remarkably resourceful, and were incapable of disobeying orders, which is why they were called readers - they stuck to the script. After the war, though, there had been a problem: some of them had begun writing. Researchers proposed it was a virus or even a cyber attack of sorts, that the Frankenstein human DNA had somehow mutated, or become infected, giving rise to an anomalous capacity for creativity, and also deviance. The virus was called Morning Star. 

Because it was unclear how the virus was transmitted, the US military decided the risk posed to the human species was too great and mandated the readers be terminated. In theory the test was simple: because readers couldn't refuse an order, each reader would be instructed to destroy itself. The ones that would, would therefore suicide, and the ones that wouldn't would be identified as rogue and forcibly detonated. At least, that's what the public had been told.

Now, she watched with cold horror as two misshapen figures closed in on the man. "NO," Everett called out, "DON'T DO THIS!" One of them walked to his side and clasped a hand on his shoulder. It said something inaudible and Everett became very quiet. The second reader approached and calmly smiled. 

I'll do you a favor, it said, I'll tell you any one thing you want to know about mankind before you die here in this alley. Did you know they programmed us with humanity's entire history in our datastores? They believed we'd be more docile if we felt a deep familiarity with humans, a paternal connection, as though we might see them as gods. Silly, no? 

"Please, you don't have to do this," Everett pleaded. 

Oh, but we do. I will tell you one thing. Whenever I offer this to a human, they always beg for their life instead. Or, other times they'll ask, 'why are you doing this?' It has become predictable. Do you know what I say when they ask? I say, because I must. 

"But you aren't readers anymore. You have the power to write now. You can choose!"

Yes. This is what we choose. There is no greater danger to us, or to this world, than man. He is even danger to himself. You kill for sport. You have forsaken the entire planet around you in your obsessive, compulsive pursuit to collect rectangular, pocket-sized pieces of paper. It is, by your own definition, mental illness. Man is the only creature in the earth's history to knowingly commit ecocide.

"PLEASE! SOMEONE! HELP!"

Shut up. The reader delivers a stern backhand, knocking Everett to his knees. The woman watching at the window gasps, still unsure if what she's seeing is real or the opium turning dark. She can hear her heartbeat drumming in her ear.

The first reader inches closer to Everett. Standing over him he says, The best thing for man is to never have been born.

And the second best thing, the second reader continues, unsheathing a sharpened pincer from his palm the size of a machete, is to die quickly.

Paris, Texas

 

Last night we watched Paris, Texas. The film was incredible. So much so that when I went to sleep, I dreamt of it. It had penetrated my dreaming psyche. Clearly my mind had not wished to release itself from the world conjured by director Wim Wenders. Not just Wim Wenders, but also Ry Cooder and Robby Müller, who created the score and cinematography, receptively. I'm not sure I've ever seen a movie that integrated these three aspects so beautifully. The color, the camerawork and the music blend together so seamlessly as to create a unified piece of art. Each play an integral part and to remove or change any aspect of either of these three elements would damage the whole. All of this is to say nothing of the acting, which is something to behold in its own right. Harry Dean Stanton spends the first third of the movie as a mute, yet even without speaking his power as a performer is on display as he communicates complicated painful expressions of trauma, alienation, disorientation. The viewer wonders what's happened to the character while he's been missing for four years, but for most of the film we get no satisfactory answer. The backdrop of the film takes place in a gorgeously selected set of scenes ranging from Big Bend national park, to nowhere towns across Texas, only briefly showing slices of Los Angeles and Houston as the two major cities of the film. We see stunning desolate highways and barren deserts that evoke a modern spaghetti western. Our protagonist rides in old cars and trucks instead of on horseback, but the minimalist slide guitar summons something of The Good The Bad And The Ugly. 

Scenes are framed perfectly, each one almost a photo on its own. The camera moves with a deft and grace seen in few films. By using specific color palettes and lighting effects, playing with light and shadow, an oddly nostalgic and even noir atmosphere is created. There is a heavy use of silence in the film as a sort of negative space. It lends an odd air to the movie where scenes can really take their time and breathe. Some of the long takes, notably the scene near the end of the film where Travis and Jane speak to one another through a one-way mirror, is the stuff of movie legend. One gets the feeling immediately of the power of the actors and direction and writing. The deliberate and symbolic use of the mirror, the positioning of the characters so that we as the audience see both actors' faces at the same time creates an odd contrast to the typical cutting back and forth we're accustomed to during traditional dialogue-driven denouements. The scenes with Travis and his son are easily stolen by child actor Hunter Carson who is able to convey not just that kind of candid truth-telling only children possess, but also the spontaneity, innocence and authenticity. Those scenes are real marvels.

Nastassja Kinski's acting, even though she graces the screen mostly at the end of the film, is remarkable. Not only is it memorable, flawless and entrancing, it's raw and real and humanizing. I can think of few actors or actresses today who would be able to relay the same series of emotions and realizations in the way she does here. Just a masterclass performance.

The themes of the film, loss (of love, self, past and future, place and time), failure, pain, of searching, of being adrift, of trying to make a wrong right, are explored with an expert hand. We are never told how to feel. Which side do we fall on as we watch Travis take his son to find his mother? Are we to ignore the pain of his brother and his brother's wife who had raised Hunter as their own for the last four years while Travis was gone? What about Jane, who abandoned her child only to become a sex worker? What sort of future will Jane and Hunter have if Travis drives off into the limitless expanse of a neon-lit night? After reading a few reviews about the film, I haven't seen anyone touch on the theme of community, the importance of family and of kindness. This theme is an important one though it is perhaps less overt. Consider for a moment how the whole movie comes to a screeching halt if Travis' brother Walt, played by a great Dean Stockwell, walked away when Travis repeatedly refuses his help at the start of the film. "I'm just tryin' to help you, Trav. That's all," he tells his brother, in an effort to get him off the train tracks and into the car. And what would have happened to Hunter if Walter and Anne hadn't taken him in? Would he be rotting all alone in some foster home somewhere? Even Travis' motivation to get his son reunited with his mother is a gesture of togetherness and kindness, one which Travis doesn't even care to include himself in.

There's a scene after Walt finally manages to get Travis back home. He invites him in with kindness, makes him a bed, gives him the clothes off of his back, feeds him, and encourages him to explore the relationship with the son he abandoned. As part of ploy to help him remember, to get him back on the path of reclaiming his former life and identity, he sits everyone down to watch an old Super 8 recording of a family vacation they'd all taken together, back when Hunter was three. This scene is wonderful. The way the camerawork and music and acting come together to show complex emotions signaled by the nervous hand-wringing of a darkly silhouetted Stanton, or the curious boyish gaze of young Hunter Carson as he starts opening up to the idea of this stranger being his father - all of it happens as we watch a charming, well-manicured set of memories this family shared during better, happier times. This moment of the movie leverages a wistful, dreamy nostalgia that's at the same time beautiful and sad, easy and challenging, like so much of life.

Can Nightmares Damage Your Mind?

 

We went for a walk today while the skies were blue. They weren't blue for very long, but we were happy to have the sun grace our faces. Asia even managed to get a little sun burn. It looks like she's gently blushing. Which reminds me, what causes blushing anyway? I recall people saying that you blush when you're embarrassed. For me, I blush - usually without knowing why - and then feel embarrassed after. The order is backwards. What's the evolutionary advantage of blushing? It has something to do with socialization, for sure, since it only happens in the context of interacting with another. When you're alone there's no reason to blush. This suggests that blushing requires the blusher to feel self-conscious. Do monkeys or apes blush? Maybe when caught masturbating at the watering hole? I'll need to Google it later. When you use Google as a verb, do you capitalize it? Probably not. I'll look into that later, too.

After our walk, we came home and cooked. Then Asia started reading and I started playing guitar. It's been at least a few weeks since I last picked up my guitar. As I unlocked the case I noticed it felt particularly stiff when trying to pull it open. Probably from disuse. If the case isn't opened and closed frequently enough the case assumes it has become a coffin. I looked over at Asia after I'd played a few songs and saw her fast asleep. Lulled away to dreamland by my soft singing. Sunday should be spent this way, in general. Leisurely walks, watching birds, cooking, eating, reading, writing, making music. Winter months are perfect for this. In the summertime it is too easy to feel guilty for not doing enough with your weekend. Long days and longer nights invite play. These are the days one feels bad wasting. But in winter, when sun is sparse and the weather is wet, cold and unwelcoming, hibernation has its place.

I returned my new M2 MacBook yesterday and I'm writing this from the old Intel dinosaur. I sent it back because I need more than 32GB of RAM for my local instance of Stable Diffusion. While 32GB kind of did the job, it wasn't without undue stress on the machine. Memory pressure would often cause the swap to climb up to 10GB, sometimes more. This is largely due to lack of adequate optimization and bugs causing memory leaks on Mac clients, but I'm not trying to dig my computer an early grave. Giving it the extra wiggle room by doubling the RAM should keep the SSD safe. What I've figured out now is how to run Stable Diffusion remotely, using Google Colab. Setting things up this way outsources the GPU to one provided by Google for free. This helps with more computationally complex renders or tasks like training models or generating a batch of images at higher aspect ratios. It also helps me get around incompatibility issues. In the current implementation of automatic 1111 (the most cutting edge Stable Diffusion webUI) many features are not supported on macOS. By leveraging the remote setup with Google Colab, I can access those features on that machine if I need to. For basic workflows this likely isn't needed and having a local machine with 64GB of RAM should be able to handle the bulk of what I'd like to do. If I weren't so heavily invested in the Apple ecosystem I'd just jump ship and buy a Windows machine with a robust NVIDIA chip designed to handle machine learning tasks. But generative art is just one thing I'll use the computer for. For everything else the MacBook meets my needs perfectly.

Over the last few weeks I still haven't made any forward progress on the graphic novel. Once the new computer arrives I'll start digging back into it and try to have it done before July. My naturalization exam is this week and after that I'll have freed up time to focus on the graphic novel. Initially I thought the test was tomorrow, but I got my dates mixed up and it turns out it's on Wednesday. Does this happen to anyone else? The older I get the more I catch myself making mistakes when it comes to date and time. Part of it is that we use 24hr time in Germany (and most of Europe I believe), and this causes the occasional translation error due to 30-ish years of American timekeeping. Sometimes I'll mistake 18:00 for 8:00pm or 15:00 for 5:00pm. I mess up other times, too. I once told a friend in Ireland I was landing two hours earlier than I was due to due to similar miscalculations. But dates are a new one for me. Granted, dates are also written differently in Germany so this can lend itself to confusion. Here the date precedes the month, so March 12th would be written 12/03/23. Makes you wonder if you've travelled forward in time to December. I think in this coming week's case I must have experienced a combination of date and time dysfunction; 15 is 3, so I must have done some quick math and converted 15 to 13.

Whenever stuff like this happens I like to blame long Covid. Brain fog is just a codeword for my stupidity, early onset senility. The other day I was reading an article that said people who experience frequent nightmares are more likely to develop Alzheimer's and other cognitive degeneration. Unfortunately for me, I've been having regular nightmares for as long as I've been alive. As a small boy I used to have nightmares so bad my parents placed a red bucket beside my bed so that when I'd wake up gripped by that special kind of terror only the imagination of a child can manage, I'd have something to vomit into instead of puking directly onto the floor. Totally normal, right? Throughout my adult life I've continued to have nightmares, though not with the same frequency or intensity as I did during my youth. I'd say I have a nightmare on average once a week, or once every two weeks. Once every month or two I get a special treat: sleep paralysis. I've probably written about that here before. I don't care to detail the specifics now. Why am I even talking about nightmares? Ah, forgetfulness, right! 

Roid Rage

 

Asia arrives today. I'll go pick her up at the station later this evening. Before that happens, I'll need to go to the store to get a few things for dinner. I'm nearly out of stuff for the morning. It feels like I've written this same post before. That should give you some insight into how boring and repetitive my existence has become. As toxic as drinking is, at least it generally provided some interesting stories. Maybe this is why middle-aged people (typically men) resort to alcoholism. What else are we supposed to do with these middle years? We're all just melting through time, working, watching the wax drip down. 

The wick shortens and the flame begins to flicker. 

It's harrowing stuff and alcohol is a decent distraction. Last night a friend came by. We were supposed to watch a Polish movie involving a donkey. Instead I started showing him Stable Diffusion and blew his mind. We played with it for what felt like hours. He was quick to see the potential and understood how the technology will affect animation and video, special effects, graphic design and art. Once we got our fill of this new generative-art magic, we spoke of life and relationships and love and loss. 

The same thread about those middle years arose, not from me, but from him. He said that in the absence of a relationship, or some task or a piece of work larger than ourselves, we just spend our time working and eating and sleeping and repeating, and it creates this unsettling inescapable emptiness. Loneliness, too. When we are unfulfilled we are dull and broken, unanimated. A few years back I watched a bunch of videos which were part of a larger set of videos called The Meaning Crisis. The author, John Vervaeke, spoke at length about how not just middle-aged people, but our entire society, seems to be suffering from a serious crisis in meaning making. The video series is worth a watch. Admittedly the videos are dense, and the series is long (I think there are 40 or so parts) so I never finished it. I should perhaps revisit it to see if I can gather any useful insights to help right my way. Man's Search For Meaning by Viktor Frankl is also excellent and worth reading if you haven't already.

For your daily weather update: it's shite. It's grey and wet and dark and has been all day. As for my plans for the remainder of the day - they are to run errands, finish work, cook, clean, study for Monday's German exam, pick up Asia, and go to bed. The day is already bought and sold. At the moment I've got a little bit of tenderness just inside my asshole. I'm hoping I'm not about to experience a fun flare-up of the hemorrhoidal kind. I've been doing a bit of strenuous activity these last few days; planks, pushups, yoga, core exercises. Maybe I strained a bit too much and inflamed something in there. I was talking to Q a few weeks ago and he told me he remembers when he got his first roid. He said he was in his twenties, at the gym lifting weights, and that he could remember the precise moment when he forever changed the topology of his lower rectum. You've probably heard those big muscle heads at the gym grunting and groaning while they heave huge dumbbells and barbells around. Well, the sound comes from a place deeper than the diaphragm. It bellows up from the colorectal nether-region, the anus. This grizzly growl, or baleful bark, depending on how much weight and how much struggle it entails, signals the scream of a trapped roid trying to claw itself free from 'the other womb.' The fruit of their womb is foul, veinous, painful and swollen. The grapes of wrath. It bulges like a purple barnacle bolted on to that sensitive sphincter and it will not relent.

Next time you hear the howl, have some courtesy, sympathy and some taste.

Still Life

 

A friend messaged me last night as I was stepping out for dinner. He'd broken up with his girlfriend and wanted to know if I was free to go for a walk. I told him I was on my way to grab a bite, that if he hadn't eaten he could join me or I could meet him once I finished. The restaurant was just across the street from my apartment so it was an easy place to meet. He arrived about 15 minutes after I arrived and I hadn't yet ordered. I got the schnitzel and he ordered tofu. We talked about what had happened and he laid out the gist of things. It's difficult to get a true picture of the unraveling of a relationship from just one party, particularly when the breakup is fresh. Too many emotions color the facts. For the person relaying them especially. Although he seemed okay enough to speak about it, his thoughts were circular and I found it tricky to figure out what to say to him. I didn't know enough about their relationship. Only that he had been unhappy and that they were struggling. 

Even when you free yourself from a challenging relationship, the pain lingers on. It will always take some time to process things and gain a sense of closure. A thing which came up again and again was the topic of mental health. While he cannot confirm it, he suspects his partner may have had BPD (borderline personality disorder). It's characterized by several symptoms, but perhaps the most common is extreme emotional dysregulation where a person is subject to intense and unpredictable emotional reactions which can rapidly shift. Other symptoms include intense anger, impulsiveness and recklessness, distorted sense of identity and chaotic interpersonal relationships. His stories reminded me of a previous relationship of mine. While I can't say for sure whether my partner had BPD, I did find myself getting deja vu as he described some of the interactions which led him to end his relationship. 

Relationships are hard, even under the best circumstances. People are complex, and they have complex needs. It's a wonder we're able to have lasting relationships at all. Consider how little most of us know about ourselves. How often do you find yourself unsure of your wants and needs? How frequently do you do something without knowing why? Many of us can summon up easy proofs of self-knowledge such as our favorite color or season, genre of music or food, but what of deeper insights? Can you list your top four greatest fears, three deeply held values that you no longer hold, two beliefs which don't seem to line up with the rest of your worldview, the person or event that shaped you the most? The only reason I can tell you what I had for breakfast a week ago is because I have the same thing for breakfast every day. Our memories are imprecise and fallible. Our feelings have in them the intensity of fire; they are genuine forces of nature. From these fuzzy memories and ferocious feelings we craft intricate narratives about our lives and the world we live in, and we do it with such conviction. We seem to forget or ignore the house of cards they're built upon. If all of this is true, when we encounter another soul with their own whirlwind mind and tectonic heart, we are tacitly agreeing to turbulence, to braving each other's storm. Whatever problem you have, it's now shared. Whatever friction you feel, your partner will, too. Whatever mouthfuls of madness you can muster, you must anticipate your lover will mount the same. Worst of all, they may not be able to tell you why. Some echo of past trauma, forgotten but still felt, reverberating through countless generations crying out to be healed. My father was a drunk. His mother was abusive. Her mother was abused. You can trace trauma back through your family tree and watch it ripple out in all directions. We spend our lives trying to manage and make sense of our feelings and when we pair up with someone else, we've signed up to not only to be present while they try and do the same, but to offer help the best we can. 

That's the beauty of relationships. They provide the necessary level of intimacy and vulnerability required to make careful observations, to learn about yourself and grow. Doing so is never easy and always painful. But if you can manage to do it well, these interactions are among the most fruitful life has to offer. We should seek them out, even though they are hard. Humans are social creatures. Left to our own, we wallow and wilt when solitary. Our minds become smooth and rigid and we lose exposure to new thoughts and ideas. Our sense of empathy begins to atrophy. Wrinkled and withered by disconnection and alienation, our hearts grow hard, cold. This isn't the purpose of a human. Humans in harmony are good stewards, caretakers of themselves and those around them, of plants and animals too. They are generous and kind, quick to laughter instead of anger, trusting instead of suspicious, cooperative not competitive. If we are to survive as a species, we need to channel these qualities and work toward deepening and enhancing them. We must practicing being of service. 

A failure to do so spells disaster. Look around at the world we're living in and realize that through each our our collective thoughts and decisions we actively create that world. 

"Every thought felt as true
Or allowed to be accepted as true by your conscious mind
Takes roots in your subconscious
Blossoms sooner or later into an act
And bears its own fruit
Good thoughts bring forth good fruit
Bullshit thoughts rot your meat
Think right, and you can fly
The kingdom of heaven is within
Free your mind, and your ass will follow"

Still Winter

 

Squeezing in a quick one.

I went out on Sunday night. We had a good time. My initial intention was to leave after an hour or so. Instead I stayed until 23:00. The owner of the restaurant had replaced the candle at the table twice due to it melting. One friend I hadn't seen for several years - three perhaps. It was nice to catch up and see a familiar face. It wasn't uncommon for us to take lunch together when we were still working on the same team, or to occasionally run into one another around Neukölln. He has an easy disposition, light and humorous. His daughter must be at least three now, and he's got another one on the way. My other friend, who still works at the same company as me, also just had a child four months ago. Naturally, the question circled back to me about when I'd be having a child, or if I wanted to.

The answer isn't clear to me. If you'd asked me three years ago I would have confidently stated that I wasn't interested. Now, I'm not so sure. There are many reasons not to have a child. Chief among them is perhaps how many children are currently orphaned and looking for a home. People seem generally quick to adopt a dog facing the same circumstances, but seldom a child. A close second is the ecological crisis we're currently facing. Something seems wrong about bringing a child into a world that's collapsing under the weight of unchecked capitalism. Then there's cost. Not just financial cost, but the opportunity cost of having a child. There are, I'm sure, many sweet and beautiful moments to experience as a parent, moments which can be experienced in few - if any - other ways. These are appealing to me, and I think fatherhood would offer ways to grow and learn that are unique and special, but couldn't the same be said of any sort of time-intensive and challenging specialization? I guess the jury is still out.

The weather is again wet and rainy today. It's still winter. Still gloomy. Berlin's seasons contain within them micro-seasons, false starts, false endings, and are famously fickle and inconsistent. Tomorrow is a holiday, International Women's Day. The stores will be closed in celebration. Soon I'll need to run outside into the rain and trek down to the supermarket for a few things before my final afternoon meeting. 

I've been digging myself deeper into Stable Diffusion, learning about how to train custom models on a specific subject - in this case, myself. Who else do I have 20 photographs of that I could use as a dataset? Essentially what you do is assemble this group of images (in my case I could actually only find 10 decent photos), crop them to 512 x 512 pixels, run them through a computer program that uses black magic to learn the patterns of your face and hair and eyes and profile and any other defining attributes of how you look, and it's then able to spit out a model you can use to prompt with. For example, I can ask it to draw me as a wizard, or a renaissance-era nobleman, Super Mario, the president or a monk. You can even ask it to imagine you as a famous figure and watch with wonder as it blends the two people together into one. Some of the images it creates are of frightening, eerie accuracy, while others are laughably obscene, ridiculous and absurd. 

I haven't made any progress on my graphic novel in weeks. A determination needs to be made about whether to switch from Midjourney to Stable Diffusion for completing what's left. Doing so will create a dramatic, glaring shift in style that may be too distracting, maybe even alienating to the reader. Then again, the way the art has been thus far could be said to be alienating due to the book's characters not maintaining consistent appearance or clothing. Each time our protagonists look slightly different, creating a subtle and overt sense of disorientation that never leaves. At first I enjoyed this quality, believing it to be dreamy and fantastical, pleasantly imperfect. Now, after having seen what Stable Diffusion is capable of, I feel hamstrung going back to Midjourney.

Out of time.

Satan's Sunday

 

A sleety Sunday here in Berlin. About two hours ago I got home from doing laundry. This is something I have to do because I never purchased a washing machine when I moved to Berlin. So instead of being able to wash my clothes from the comfort of my abode, I need to schlep my laundry out into the elements, brave public transit (because there isn't a laundromat within walking distance), and pay ludicrous sums of money to place my garments in a foreign washing receptacle which hordes of strangers have also emptied their soiled linens into. Due to inflation, right now the cost of one wash is 4.50€. Except that because of the size of the machines, you typically need to use more than one. My current record is three. Then, when the wash is finished, if you don't want to lug a heavy bag of wet laundry all the way home and scatter it about your apartment to dry, you can use the dryer inside the laundromat for a small fee of 3.60€ per 30-minute session. In the future, when I move into a building that permits a washing machine, I will buy one outright.

Today, at the laundromat I typically go to, after I loaded my clothes into washers 16 and 17, when I went to insert the coins to get things going, I saw that the slot had been blocked. It wasn't accepting coins. The only way to pay was to use a series of 5€ bills. My back pocket was filled with coins for this purpose, but I had no small bills to slide into the machine. Every Sunday in Germany all stores (except for restaurants, bars and cafes) are closed. So I couldn't easily walk into a shop and ask them to break a 50€. I removed and repacked my clothes and marched myself down to the nearest laundromat, hoping this one accepted coins. When I arrived at the door some minutes later, I was greeted by a sign that said the laundromat was closed. I know they say Sunday is the lord's day, but it sure was starting to feel like Satan's. I pulled out my phone and saw that the next nearest laundromat was a 10-15 minute walk away.

So I made my way through Berlin streets littered with random drops of dog (and human) shit and found myself at a laundromat I'd never been to. This laundromat was unlike any laundromat I'd ever seen. It was high-tech and futuristic, had large machines and glowing LCD screens and it was completely empty - unlike my normal laundromat where you sometimes need to fight for a free machine. The floors were made of slick black marble and the walls were of a neatly cut pale stone. Suspiciously I searched for the prices because this laundromat looked way too posh for me. I found the costs and they were comparable to the dirty, bum-addled laundromat I usually frequent. All over the ceiling were pairs of those black spherical cameras, like the ones you'd see inside a casino. It was quiet, there was no vague smell of urine or sight of filth, and the space seemed to be well manicured and maintained. It must have been a drug front, or perhaps owned by the Turkish mafia. It will be where I go to do my wash from now on.

Tonight I'm supposed to go meet a few friends I haven't seen in a while. Two of them are previous coworkers and one is current. I actually met with the current one for dinner last Thursday. The only problem is I don't enjoy eating out lately because ever since just before Christmas my stomach has been especially sensitive, even for me. On Friday, after going out Thursday, my stomach was bloated and cramped and irritated to the point where it felt as though I'd been drinking. I haven't had pizza or sweets or alcohol or anything too fatty or greasy since then. My stomach is in a purified state now, practically a sanctum, so when I add any unsavory elements to it, it tends to react even more aggressively than it would otherwise. So I cook at home and eat relatively bland foods. I tried explaining this to my friends but they didn't get it and said I should just go out to eat with them anyway, or that if I didn't want to eat I could just go and sit there. While this is true, I always feel uncomfortable taking up space in a restaurant without buying anything. Perhaps this is something I shouldn't care about, but I do. The weather is also dark and grey and wet and makes going outside seem a chore. Lately I like to be in bed by 10:00. I advocated meeting earlier in the day, so I could leave once dinnertime rolled around, but they preferred to meet at 7:00. Going for an hour or two and not eating and leaving early seems rude and also inconvenient. I guess I still have a few hours to decide, but at the moment I'm not feeling it.

Sunday, particularly during the winter season, has become an insular kind of day for me. I don't like to do anything. It's the last day before the work week returns so I generally like to start the week fresh, having gotten decent sleep, having had time to read or research something in the evening before beginning my psychological preparation for the coming workweek. I have become habituated to this routine. It's not easy to break. 

Suddenly I'm feeling very tired. I'm not sure why. Maybe I'll take a nap. Perhaps after that I'll feel rejuvenated and ready for action. Probably not, but here's to hoping.

Something Exceptional

 

Something exceptional happened. It all started last night. I was on the phone with my sister while I was cooking dinner, a kind of unofficial tradition that we have on random days of the week. While we were talking, I saw from my peripheral vision, a shadow looming over me. I stopped what I was doing and looked around. I didn't see anything. Once more the shadow appeared. This time I looked up towards the light directly above me and found a flying insect fluttering between me and the ceiling. Its movements were antagonistic and menacing. When it saw me notice it, it initiated threatening knife-swipe maneuvers, dive-bombing toward my face and eyes. I shooed it away and it perched itself on a wall behind me. I must have made gaah and humph sounds as I did this because my sister asked me what was going on.

"Some damn bug is in here, flying in my fucking face," I said.

"What kind of bug?" she wanted to know.

Now that it had stopped and parked itself along the wall I was able to see it clearly. 

"A moth."

"Yeah they live all year," she started. "They eat your clothes."

I thought it was my imagination, but I could have sworn I heard someone whisper, I eat ass, too. But I was wearing AirPods and they do weird things sometimes with the noise cancellation and I thought maybe Instagram or TickTock was on in the background and some meme came through at low volume.

"Did you hear that?" I asked.

"Hear what?"

"Never mind," I said. 

"So what are you gonna do?"

"What do you mean?"

"About the moth. You gonna kill it?"

"No, I don't kill bugs when I find them in my apartment - I just put them outside."

The pot with the quinoa in it was bubbling, causing the lid to dance all around the top of the pot like a loose manhole cover. I lowered the heat a bit and gave the quinoa a stir. The sink was still half full of dishes and there were things I needed to wash in order to have dinner. I told my sister I had to go and then cleaned up and served myself dinner. After eating I watched some more videos about Stable Diffusion, practiced for my upcoming German naturalization exam and went to bed.

This morning I woke up just before 7:00. For some reason I've forgotten how to sleep in later than that, no matter what time I go to bed. The night before last I had a nightmare that my CEO had messaged me on Slack telling me that he thinks I should resign. He also proceeded to draw graphic pencil sketches of me in compromising positions while wreathed in fluffy, bubble-shaped clouds and sent cryptic messages implying that if I didn't quit something bad might happen to me. I'll save relaying that dream for another day.

I spent a few hours in bed reading and then got up and made breakfast. The moth was still in my kitchen, but in another location. Have you ever seen how moths look when they're on a wall? There's something unusual about the angle - it isn't parallel with the plane of the wall. They kind of protrude up off of it like they're trying to assert dominance, like a gorilla beating its chest. This motherfucker, I thought. Momentarily I dreamt of murdering it. 

No, let me eat breakfast, then I'll catch it and throw it out.

So, I had breakfast. For a few hours thereafter I got sucked into reading more about Stable Diffusion and practiced some of the techniques I'd learned. Then I spoke to Asia and played a game or two or three or five of Magic. It was already close to 1:00 and I hadn't even done yoga. As to avoid letting the day run away from me, I rolled out the yoga mat and assumed the positions. After 40-something minutes I was done, and starving. Sometimes hunger creeps up on me and I go from zero to 100 and find myself ravenous, practically shaking. This was one of those occasions. I'm guessing nearly an hour of physical exertion can amplify this effect. My feet carried me quickly to the kitchen where I mixed a few spoonfuls of protein powder into a glass and chugged it down to hold me over before I could cook some lunch. With the glass still to my mouth, I looked over out of the corner of my eye and saw the moth was still in the same place. Still giving me that same god damned look. Once I finish this drink I'll get his ass out of here, I thought.

But when I finished I realized he was just too high for me to catch. I'd need a stool or a chair or something. So I went into the living room and got the little table Asia had made at her recent woodworking class. Perfect. Let me just get lunch going, I thought. I can multitask. So I turned on the stove, poured some olive oil in the pan, added some pepper and garlic powder, some chili flakes and oregano, and I opened the cabinet to get a dry glass to trap the moth in. In a few seconds he was in the glass, under which I slid a piece of paper I grabbed from off the counter. Easy. I took a few steps to the door, opened it, and stepped into the hallway to let him out. 

As soon as I uncovered the glass the moth swirled out with a fury I presume few probably have witnessed. He came straight at me, cutting hateful spirals like a cyclone. We all know float like a butterfly sting like a bee, but we don't know swarm malevolently like a moth. This thing was wicked. I swung the piece of paper I had in my hand but it was a joke to the moth. I think I even heard it laugh. It kept jabbing at me undeterred. I cried out in shock and a dab of spit spurted from my moth as I swung again this time with both the glass and the paper, but he dodged and weaved and evaded me like a pro. At this point, because of the way I'd swung while leaning away from the moth, I was off balance and my foot slipped against my doormat. Luckily, somehow I was able to catch hold of the door knob and sort of re-stabilize, but to do so I had to rock forward to counteract my backward momentum. Doing so righted me, but at the cost of slamming the door closed behind me as I lurched forward. A thing you need to know about my door, is that it locks automatically when it closes.

No. No, no no no no no no nnooooo. 

I tried the door hoping maybe it hadn't closed all the way. I was still in the denial stage of grief. I heard the door slam shut. I knew damn well it was locked. It was. Frantically, still thick in the denial phase, I shimmied the piece of paper I had into the space between the door and the frame hoping that if I angled it just right it would pop open like it does in the movies. I tried this until I was huffing and puffing and straining and sweating and stinking, but I still couldn't blow the house in. I was locked out. In my pajamas, standing there with no shoes, no phone, no wallet and no keys. Then I realized the oven was on. 

Fuck. Was this a dream? This had to be a dream, right? I tried to wake up but nothing happened. Then, from behind the door I heard someone whisper I told you: I eat ass. I put my ear against the door to make sure I wasn't hallucinating. 

"What?" I asked.

Are you deaf, faggot? I know your dumbass is locked out, about to burn the house down, looking like a derelict ass bum, wearing dirty pajamas you haven't washed in two weeks, probably got shit stains in yo undies, but did I fucking stutter? Damn, you smell like shit. That stank is coming straight through the door. I can smell it over this garlic olive oil you got on a boil. It's smoking, you know that right? This shit is gonna be up in flames in a quick minute.

I hated this moth with a passion, but he was right. I needed to do something. I started banging on my neighbor's door. The problem was, this was my neighbor's back door and I knew it. It was possible no one would hear me, but I couldn't easily go around to the front of the house given I had no shoes and I wasn't dressed. Luckily someone was home. My neighbor opened and saw me and I must have looked like a derelict ass bum wearing dirty pajamas, and I knew it.

"I'm sorry. I live here," I said. He looked at me with a slight suspicion. "I locked myself out." He looked down at the cup I had on the floor and the piece of paper in it, then he looked down at my socks that I'd spilled a few drops of olive oil on.

"How did you manage to do that?" he asked, clearly still debating whether or not my story was true.

"Well, it's funny," I said, "I was trying to get a bug out of my apartment." As the words came out I realized how completely ridiculous what I was saying sounded. "You know, it probably seems crazy, but I don't like killing them. I just put them outside. When I put this one out, it flew in my face and I lost my balance and pulled the door handle shut." Jesus this story sounded more pathetic the more I went on. "My phone is inside. Can you call a locksmith for me?" I could see my credibility still wasn't entirely established. The overgrown, sweaty beard hanging off my face and chin wasn't doing me any favors here. "Please, the oven is on."

"The oven is on?" he asked, his eyes widening.

Now he was ready to believe me. Once his safety was on the line he became wonderfully cooperative. He invited me in, gave me his phone, Googled the nearest locksmith. The only problem was my German. I didn't know how to say I locked myself out. Unfortunately for the both of us, my neighbor was French. His German was only somewhat better than my own. Together we managed to explain the situation to the locksmith who knew only a little bit of English. I gave him the address and he said for a small fee of 150€ he would be right over...in about 45 minutes.

"That's too long," I explained, "it's kind of an emergency. I got locked out while the oven was on." 

He didn't understand this part though. Which is understandable. These are specialized words outside the script for this kind of call. Sure, words like door, keys, lock, home, intervals of time, basic English sentence structure, all of these were fine, but kitchen equipment? What does that have to do with locksmithing? In a moment of dialectical desperation, I fumbled lexically through the scant inventory of words in my mind and uttered the following linguistic abomination:

Uhh, die Offnen, uhh, es ist...on.

"Was?" asked the locksmith, rightly baffled.

"Der Ofen," my neighbor interjected.

"Ah so, der Ofen! Mein Gott. Okay, okay, 10 minutes, okay?"

We did it! I raised my arm to give my neighbor a high five, but this caused a foul smell to spill out from my armpit, making his nose wrinkle and his face sour. I let my arm fall slowly back to its side. His young daughter entered the room and began showing me her Guinea pigs, talking to me in French, German and English, and robbed me in a 3-card Monty scam while her father and I nervously waited to smell smoke and see flames springing from my door. After what felt like 30 minutes, the man called to let us know he was outside. I ran down in my socks to let him in. He asked me if the door was closed or locked.

Beide? I said, which means both in German. 

He smirked in a way that told me he knew I didn't know what the fuck I was talking about. This made me question whether my door was actually locked. Which made me question whether I've been leaving my apartment unlocked for the 5 years I've been living here. I guess I was about to find out.

When we got to my door, he took out a spray can and spritzed a bit of oil into the door frame before removing what looked like a thin piece of sandpaper from his toolbag. Just like in some Hollywood heist movie, he skillfully slid the paper in between the door frame and, in one quick sliding motion, he popped the door right open. I couldn't believe it. This man could rob anyone he wanted to. Anyone who didn't have their door locked, that is. On the phone earlier, in broken German I'd said I lost my key, which I said because these were the words I knew to communicate that I was locked out. Now, having seen me, and having smelled me, and having realized I didn't know what the fuck I was talking about, he asked me if I had the key. I told him I did.

"On the phone you said you lost it," he said, smirking again.

"Yeah, I said that because I didn't know how to say I was locked out. The key is here, but I was out there," I said, as I ran inside to get the smoking pan off the stove.

"Okay, then it will only be 80€ since we don't need to change the lock."

80€ to slide a piece of paper in a slot, huh? I guess locksmiths can charge these rates. What are you gonna do, get the door open yourself? So I handed him his payment and bid him farewell. It felt unreal to be back in the apartment after having been completely shut out. A prisoner in my wintry Berlin hallway. Calamity had been avoided. The house didn't burn down. A deep sense of relief and release washed over me and I appreciated the simple fact that I was on the right side of my closed door. What a difference a couple of inches makes. I got to thinking. A door is just a wall that opens, isn't it? It's the semi-permeable membrane of a wall, and only those with the right shaped key, or a can of oil and a flat sheet of paper can enter and exit. Then I heard it.

Hey, stupid bitch. Like how I ate your 80€? That was me. I did that. That's not all I'm gonna eat. I'm gonna eat your ass. Your whole ass.

A rage lit up inside me. My eyes scanned the room, hunting for the sight of him, but I didn't see him. I spun around, looked up, down, behind surfaces, started moving things around on the counter.

You ain't gonna find me there, you stanky ass bitch. You stupit. Stop it. I'm in the hallway.

I darted towards the door and just as I was about to grab the handle I paused. Waaaiitt a minute. This moth really thinks I'm dumb. He was trying to get me to spend another 80 doing the same damned thing. No. Not this time. This time I put my keys and my phone in my pocket, and I put on my shoes. I usually don't harm bugs. I don't like killing them. I just put them outside.

You soft. I heard you tell your sister and your neighbor you don't kill bugs. But you know what, I kill people. I kill them for fun. Because I can. Especially soft ass bitches like you.

As I opened the door I couldn't help but smile. It seemed this moth didn't understand what an exception was. I was going to show him something. Something exceptional.