My friend Nina from CHALK TALK has a show on UCLA Radio every Tuesday at 5 pm, which is 2 am here in Berlin. I am of course awake then and so I reliably TUNE IN, usually while sulking in the bathtub. For weeks I have wanted to call in between songs, but I kept missing my chance. Well! Tonight I did call in, and Nina and her cohost put me on the air without letting me know that I was on the air. So I just rambled on like a total jackass for five minutes about the etymology of her cohost’s name (it’s Greek and means “wisdom” (lol)) and how it won’t stop snowing in Berlin, and how I feel sentimental about California, and so on, not realizing that a bunch of random people in Los Angeles could hear me. Well! In all honesty, I think that rules. It’s probably better that I didn’t know.

Back when my cousin was in college, I would call in to his radio show every single week with a different voice and do a stupid bit for as long as I could. Like I’d say I was an expert on Civil War cannonballs or something and just make a bunch of shit up until he caught on.

Man, that’s absolutely what I should have done tonight. Oh well!! Next time . . .

(P.S. I miss Chalk Talk and my friends from Bex’s band. When I was with them in Oakland and LA last year, I was the happiest I’d been in a long time. It’s true! I told everyone I’m Down To Drive Again this summer if they’d have me. I’ll fly all the way back to California just to do it. Why not? Well, they said yes. If I’m still alive by then, I reckon that’s just what I’ll do!!!)

Several of my friends have come to visit me in Berlin, and I’ve forgotten to post the pictures I took when they were here. So I’m gonna do it now!

Back in January, Molly and Daisy, who are sisters from England, and who I met in Portland a long time ago, stayed with me in Friedrichshain. Every morning we ate at a breakfast place nearby called Frölich (which means cheerful!). See here:

I then took them to Treptower Park to gaze at the severe Soviet monuments there:

. . . and to the Victory Column in the Tiergarten, which Molly and I scaled for €4 (Daisy was tired and stayed below with her sketchpad):

We also met up with JULES and went to some weird museum whose name I have forgotten:

We also saw a (pretty bad) movie at my favorite theater in Neukölln:

Molly went back to New York and Daisy went back to their little hometown in England, and I felt pretty sad about it.

. . . until Emel-Elizabeth, The Girl From Estonia, finally returned to Berlin for Berlinale and stayed with me here in Schöneberg. We had dinner at Jess’s massive apartment nearby:

We also ate at this Korean place nearby that has Bible verses written in German plastered all over the walls, and all the beer is non-alcoholic. It was really good!

Later, at the 24-hour grocery store by the U-bahn station, Emel was mystified, as I was, by the Germans’ great love of soup precariously stored in what appear to be plastic sausage casings:

On February 24th, AS IS MY WONT, we celebrated Twin Peaks Day by getting pie and coffee:

On the way home, we walked by a playground you’d see in a nightmare:

Finally, we sat down in the living room and searched for each other on T*nder, and then matched. (Apparently her mom calls her Ella ???)

The film festival WRAPPED UP, and so she flew back to Tallinn, and once again I felt real sad about it. This feeling has persisted ever since.

Well!

tracey is one of my best friends. the other day i found her new novel at dussmann books in berlin and it was surreal. i’m really proud of her

friday

Back when my cousin and I ran this little publishing company in Oakland, we befriended a dude named Fielden Nelson. I had read a short thing he’d written on a popular website I don’t want to link to, and so I sent him an email and we started talking. Fielden was a cool guy. This was over 10 years ago now, and when he wrote this, he was about my age now. I don’t think he’d mind if I reposted it in its entirety:

You will move to L.A. from somewhere in the Midwest without previously obtained shelter or employment. You will be cautiously optimistic. You will have a solid short term plan. All of your childhood will be in your trunk.

You will have been moderately successful. You will stay with more successful friends. Because it is California, the land to where the more successful have already moved. You will stay with good friends. You will stay with friends of good friends. You will stay with colleagues of friends of good friends.

You will stay in extra rooms, assigned to non-extra functions. You will stay in living rooms, assigned to living functions. You will sleep on pull-out couches. You will consume limited space. You will overstay your welcome. You will walk in on intimacies. You will see nipples. You will hear what other people sound like. In the bathroom. In the bedroom. When they think they are alone or cushioned by walls.

You will sleep in hotels. You will sleep in motels. You will sleep in your car. You will sleep in a tent. You will have a graduate degree. You will turn 37.

You will look for jobs. You will send out résumés. You will do interviews for things like Bakery Counter Night Person, Part-time Intern for the Assistant Manager, and Personal Assistant to the Hostess/Host. You will not get jobs. You were bored working when you were a teenager.

You will walk other people’s dogs. You will watch other people’s homes. You will sit in other people’s chairs and use other people’s pillows. You will be surrounded by other people’s pictures, other people’s food, and their odd intimate tastes. In art. Lighting. Soap. You will be paid to do this. This will come to not feel strange.

You will walk. You will turn down random streets. You will consider collecting random things. You will consider building random things that will serve random purposes. You will consider pirates and their place in the modern world. You will lose any fear of lost.

Your cousin/friend of a friend/former classmate will get a major role. Write/direct/manage/create/invent a Hollywood Internet Silicone Valley thing. They will instant message all available social satellites: Never stop chasing your dreams. Hard work will pay off in the end. You have to fall before you phoenix. They will be 23.

You will focus too hard on the minute details of doing everyday things. You will grow to not trust spelling, grade school historical facts, the pronunciation of words, or the nerve responses returned from your fingertips.

You will at some point overhear these random phrases: fusion bicycle; going from consulting straight to banking is rare; traffic-driven website; my producer would kill me if he knew I was telling you this but. You will want to punch the people saying these things. As hard as possible. In the stomach. Until you realize they spend two hours every day with their personal stuntman/ex-marine/part-time porn star/niche martial-arts trainer who teaches them to flip off walls and obliterate boulders of low self-esteem. And to do ten reps after you’re dead. Step aside. The war is over.

Your relatives will die. Your mother will break down like you’ve never seen her break down before. Over the phone. You will not be able to attend funerals.

You will borrow money from people you’ve already borrowed money from. You will move into a broken apartment. It will cost more than your first car.

You will fall out of love. You will fall in love. You will fall out of love.

You will run out of money. You will be glad it’s always warm. You will stare at the sea. You will stare at the sun. You will stare at the birds breaking up blue. You will stare at the wind leant palms.

I remember feeling like I related to these sentiments at the time, but I was mistaken. Maybe in a quote-unquote spiritual sense it resonated with me, or at least I wished they did, though the reality is that I had not yet truly experienced many of the quiet sadnesses and feelings of disillusionment that he talks about.

What I’m saying now is that, YEAH, having just reread this many years later, I have absolutely bore witness to and lived these things firsthand. I’m always saying that in some ways, bad-interesting experiences are almost better than good experiences, and I got plenty of the former, for whatever that’s worth, probably not much . . .

Though yeah: this little essay is good. It is airtight and wastes no words. It’s also 100% true.

(Fielden? You still out there, brother . . . ?)

My sister took this picture of me outside of Quince Cafe in Berkeley, California in 2018. That’s my black and gold special edition 1981 Datsun 280zx, which I loved. It was in near-mint condition and barely had over 100k miles on it. I drove that thing real fast all over the Bay Area, mostly at night, with the interior lit up dimly by the orange gauges. And every other Friday I took it to the carwash and sprayed it down and waxed it.

Sometimes people would come up to me in parking lots and say, “I had one of those in high school,” or, “My boyfriend drove one of those in high school.” And so on. It was a sort of cheap Japanese sports car, so I guess even a high school kid in the early 80s could afford one. I mean the car is basically just designed to look cool and make out in, which are two of the primary objectives of any self-respecting 80s teenager.

AND I GOTTA SAY: it really was a good make-out car. I mean, it just was! I remember picking up this teacher and taking her to a drive-in movie theater in San Jose, and we got drunk and made out during a really bad movie. It was great. And sometime later, while ripping onto 580 around midnight with this oceanographer I’d met, I remember she put her head on my shoulder and held my hand, and I thought, “Yeah dude . . .”

(Another time, this kinda crazy girl hugged and kissed my car a block away from the Wolfhound as I stood several feet away wondering at all the decisions I had made in my life that had lead me to that moment.)

It was painful to get rid of the 280zx. I had considered mothballing it somewhere, maybe in a garage in Berkeley near the Bay, but I didn’t want to pay to store it, and anyway it just would have sat there collecting dust. At that point I hadn’t intended to return to California in a permanent sense. So I sold it to the only person who contacted me about it, an army vet in the North Bay, just days before I left for Berlin in 2019. He gave me $6,500 cash and drove it home with his son without ever test driving it, which seemed insane to me. I put the money in my savings account and lived off of it while in Germany. (Three months later, the pandemic would start, and I’d blow a good chunk of that money buying a last-minute ticket back to the States before the worldwide lockdown began.)

Though yeah: As sad as it was to watch the 280zx turn right off my street and disappear forever, I did feel a sort of relief on account of knowing a big black hole for money was gone from my life. Anytime something beneath the car rattled or sounded weird, I knew I was about to throw a big wad of cash into a black hole. I was in constant fear that the it would just blow up or stop running, or else get stolen, which was not at all a slim probability in the East Bay. Not to mention filling up that massive 19-gallon tank ran me about $70 each time, and I was on a miserable publishing salary.

The Datsun 280zx was a nice to have. IN TRUTH: it made me feel cool whenever I drove it. I would only ever buy one again if I had a big pile of money, and kept it as a Weekend Car in the same way a dad does. I don’t anticipate ever having a big pile of money. And so saying, I guess the eighteen months I spent with it and the thousands of miles I put on that thing will remain a distant memory growing more distant. Maybe one day I’ll be some played-out chump missing my long-gone Datsun like those boomers who approached me and gazed sentimentally at my car in grocery store parking lots. Hopefully I’ll be dead by then. But if not: I reckon there are worse fates.

jules works right around the corner from me now