I am watching my brother MCCUNE play a game called HALLOWEEN FOREVER while it continues to SNOW outside my WINDOW!!

me lol

Did you know my family is from Austria? It’s true!

Some years ago—never mind how long precisely—having little or no money in my purse, and nothing particular to interest me on shore, I emailed the Austrian consulate in New York City and inquired about obtaining dual citizenship through my maternal grandmother. I wanted to escape the United States of America once and for all.

See: My grandmother survived World War II, and had to escape Europe after the war, what with her country being in total disarray. Her house had been bombed out during the air raids, and she had to hide with her mother until the Russians liberated Vienna from the Nazis. Worst of all, her father, my great-grandfather, had been captured by the Gestapo and murdered at Auschwitz, on account of his being half Jewish, although he was a practicing Christian. It was a real sadness.

She went to San Francisco to stay with her aunt, and learned English in something like six months. She ended up living all over the world with my grandfather, but they eventually settled in Virginia (which is how I ended up being born there (lol)). And because she loved Austria so much, and having many cousins there still, she visited once or twice a year up until the final years of her life. I accompanied her to Vienna one Christmas and she showed me all the places she had lived, and where her friends and parents’ friends had lived. It was amazing!

When she died in 2018, I told my family I would like for my sister and I to take her remains back to Vienna. She always deeply identified with her Austrian heritage, and I knew that if she had known she would have ended up there again one day, she would have been very happy. That October we really did fly over there and do just that. We committed her to the deep in her cousin’s flower garden in the countryside, where she always stayed when she visited. My grandmother loved Vienna and she loved flowers. It seemed like the best place for her mortal remains to be interred.

While I was there I thought it would be nice if I could declare citizenship and reclaim my own Austrian-ness. And I remembered what the consulate had told me years earlier: that even though my grandmother was Austrian born and raised, persecuted and forced to flee her homeland, I would not be able to obtain a passport through her lineage, what with Austria not allowing dual citizenship. What a drag. It would have been my ticket to very easily moving to Berlin, which I did end up doing a year and two months later, and which was made many times more difficult because I did not have that passport. I endeavored to go back one day, figuring I’d find some other way around it all, even though I knew that meant mountains of German bureaucracy and paperwork. I sighed and got on with my life (and then The Virus came).

WELL GUESS WHAT: The light from THE LORD ABOVE has finally shone down upon me, because in September the Parliament of the Republic of Austria officially extended citizenship to descendants of Nazi persecution. Hey! I’m in that group!! So of course my sister and I are barreling full-speed through the process of obtaining Austrian citizenship and Austrian passports. I mean, an Austrian passport is worth a million dollars, as far as I’m concerned. I’m gonna have dual citizenship, which apparently not even Austrian citizens can get. I’ll be able to vote and everything. And as a newly-minted citizen of the EU, I can legally travel / live / work freely in all twenty-eight EU countries. Whoa!! Though it is optional, we have decided to attend our citizenship swearing-in ceremony thing at the Austrian embassy as soon as the deal is done. Why not? And on that blesséd day, I will, whether I want to or not, make the exact same face I made on some beautiful day in Vienna two and half years ago now, which is a sort of sharky Jack Nicholson grin, ALL THE WHILE chiefin on an invisible doob:

And then I reckon I’ll go back to Berlin at some point in the near future, impervious to all the horseshit red-tape a non-citizen like my former self was forced to suffer through. Yeah baby!!

OK to be continued~ ☆彡

SORRY!!

. . . I reckon I got lost in time there for a little while. It’s just that not much ever changes, and what with it being so cold and dark all the time, I hardly notice when a stretch of days pass. Sometimes I’ll think it’s only been two or three days when really a week and a half have gone by. I am still in self-exile in the East Coast, in the part of it where I spent almost two decades, and there are not many people to talk to. It does something to you! It has done something to me. Unless I make a point to drive somewhere and talk to a cashier I have befriended, there is little else you can do other than read or write or watch movies or nap or drive around. A few times I have gone on long walks . . . but it’s just not as fun when you’re freezing your god darn bag off out there! What else is there? Well, I write a lot of letters . . . write until my hand hurts, even. Then it’s back to the handful of things I cycle through to keep me from going completely insane. . . .

And so it was that after weeks and then months of mostly being isolated, and going on in this way, I have lost any sense of time, and have let it get away from me. The way I tell time anymore is to look at my hair in the mirror, which is getting increasingly annoying to comb, what with it being so long. The more annoying it is, the more time has passed. The lady who cuts my hair in Berkeley texted me the other say, and sheepishly let me know she was available again. They’ve lifted restrictions in the San Francisco Bay Area, you see. I told her I desperately needed her help getting this fucking helmet off my head. And she was the last person to cut it, now that I think about it, way back in the summer. Lord! It must have been in July, just before I left for Utah, where I got trapped in the Utah Salt Flats on the first night of my trip!

Hah! So a little over six months ago. Since then I have flown and driven many thousands of miles all over the country to do whatever it is I do, and shampooing and conditioning my hail with argan oil all the while. Now, imprisoned in an endless sea of ice, and having sung all the told all the tales, real and imaginative, I wile away the remaining days I have left until I go back to California where I ought to be, crippled though it is! That’s what they say, anyway—that California, after leading the country as a sort of guiding light of smart science early in the pandemic, is now ground zero for mass deaths and infections. But what can I do? I can’t stay here any longer. I am living a non-life here in a way that feels more poisonous to me than it did when I was quarantined in the East Bay for the first half of quarantine. I chalk it up to losing the good weather, the good trails and sidewalks, and friendly action from a distance. Here I am in a tomb, and not just any tomb . . . it is a place where I spent nearly two-thirds of my life with everyone I ever knew, and now the whole thing is hollowed out, and everyone is gone. Nothing new can happen to me here. I’m not going to launch into yet another lonely diatribe about how being here feels like being locked inside an abandoned amusement park, though there it is. It’s just that it’s eating my brain to keep driving by all the dead places here, now emptied of all meaning and significance to me. I have this childish compulsion to revisit certain places here, as if, by simply being in proximity, I can absorb some ancient memory from them. I mean, that’s at least a little pathetic. And anyway it never works. I have tried it a thousand times and it does nothing but deepen the well of sadness. There is nothing mystical in the dark woods waiting to be discovered by me. It cannot be got back. So again I have to leave it, and probably for good this time.

I may have more to say about that later. But maybe also it would be better for everyone if I left it at that. Hmmm. . . .

Thing is, I have a plan for What Comes Next, which is this: My friends Mitch and Leyla are preparing a place for me in their house in the Oakland Hills. I’ve always wanted to live up there. Why not? They have a sort of standalone basement unit with its own private entrance, and so they are going to let me take it over. I tell you what: I can’t wait to get my stuff out of that storage unit in Berkeley and drive it up into the hills and just chill. All I want to do is put some books on some bookshelves. OK? And I’m going to get a gigantic TV and a bed and everything. I haven’t had my own bed since Berlin. It’s been almost a solid of year of sleeping on people’s floors and couches. Enough!! I will have a bed again. All I gotta do is have IKEA deliver a mattress to the Oakland Hills and pick up my comforter from Laura’s apartment in San Francisco, and hey presto, maybe I won’t have excruciating neck and back pain anymore. Oh, my god . . . and I’m going to buy a car too. I gotta. Hell, I may even do it the very day I get back into town, which is not long from now. We shall seeeeeee~!

WELL: I would be remiss if I didn’t mention that my good friend / spirit-sister Monty and our friend / her roommate Natasha came down from New York City this past weekend to see me before I leave this place forever. We got stoned and drank gas station coffee and drove around, as you do in such places and during times like these. And we visited Washington, DC, presently a sort of disaster war zone, and putzed around town seeing whatever it is there is to see, which is not much these days . . . miles of iron fencing tipped with barbed wire and armed guards staring hatefully at you from the other side. But we made the best of it, I guess . . . and when it all got to feel too oppressive, we drove back down to my hometown ripped out of our skulls and made udon and drank hot chocolate and watched the X-Files while it snowed outside, effectively trapping us in, and delaying Monty and Natasha’s Sunday departure by one whole day.

Here are some cute pictures we took:

How nice is it that they drove all that way just to hang out my podunk hometown, where people walk around with holstered guns on their hips and drive monster trucks festooned with racist bumper stickers? Those are true friends, OK. I miss them! It has been lonely as hell since they left.

I really ought to sleep . . . I’ll have more to say in the early afternoon, when I eventually wake up. In fact I mean to say it now, except I want to fit in one more episode of the X-Files before I go to sleep. . . .

(me)

OK~ ☆彡