just the other day i quoted ‘the book of laughter and forgetting’ here . . . and then two days later milan kundera died. i liked that guy. i’ll quote him again:

She wants to have her notebooks so that the flimsy framework of events, as she has constructed them in her school notebook, will be provided with walls and become a house she can live in. Because if the tottering structure of her memories collapses like a clumsily pitched tent, all that Tamina will be left with is the present, that invisible point, that nothingness moving slowly toward death.

rest in peace

In one hour I am going to take the S-Bahn south from Schöneberg to Grunewald (literally “Green Forest”), which is a massive forested area on the outer rim of Berlin, to meet a Russian Girl there. I am to meet her outside a weird little restaurant / bar within Grunewald, where we’ll shotgun a few beers or whatever, and then get to walking. I told her I’m down to walk five miles (eight kilometers (lol)) AT MINIMUM, as I consider anything less than that to be a Baby Walk. She said, “да” and I said, “YeeeaaahhhhhhHHHH duuudddeeEEEE!”

So we’re gonna do it. It is imminent. All I need to do is brush my teeth and then I’m out the door.

Am I going to bring some of the edibles I received in a package from California yesterday? CAN this girl be trusted? Find out next week at my funeral!!

We had BATMAN RETURNS on VHS when I was a kid. It came out when I was five years old. And I remember confiding in my older sister that I thought Michelle Pfeiffer as Catwoman was a total babe. She told everyone in my family and teased me about it. I didn’t care. I was also right.

Anyway, I rewatched it again for the first time in a long time, and lord have mercy:

What I want to say is that in remembering that Michelle Pfeiffer as Catwoman was my first crush, I suddenly made a lot more sense TO myself. It explained a lot about the subsequent thirty years of my life. I guess you can figure out what that means if you really want to, though I ain’t gonna spoil it.

But yeah, weird kinky bipolar Catwoman who puts a live bird in her mouth is the best Catwoman. OK?

bye for now~

i found dante and me in final fantasy ix

. . . The woman he had loved most (he was thirty at the time) would tell him (he was nearly in despair when he heard it) that she held on to life by a thread. Yes, she did want to live, life gave her great joy, but she also knew that her “I want to live” was spun from the threads of a spiderweb. It takes so little, so infinitely little, for someone to find himself on the other side of the border, where everything—love, convictions, faith, history—no longer has meaning. The whole mystery of human life resides in the fact that it is spent in the immediate proximity of, and even in direct contact with, that border, that it is separated from it not by kilometers but by barely a millimeter.

. . . But this time his gesture had no effect. His own gaze was much weaker than the gaze he felt on him, the dubious gaze of the board of examiners, which knew full well that he was repeating himself and informed him that all repetition was mere imitation and all imitation was worthless. Jan suddenly saw himself through the young woman’s eyes. He saw the pitiful pantomime of his gaze and gesture, that stereotyped gesticulation emptied of all meaning by years of repetition. Having lost its spontaneity, its natural, immediate meaning, his gesture suddenly made him unbearably weary, as if six-kilo weights had been attached to his wrists. The young woman’s gaze created an odd field around him, increasing the weight tenfold.

He had no way of continuing. He let go of the young woman’s head and looked out the window at the gardens passing by. The train reached its destination. As they were leaving the railroad station, she told Jan she lived nearby and invited him over.

He refused.

And then he thought about it for weeks: how could he have turned down a woman he liked?

In his relation to her he was on the other side of the border.

stella and her friends are staying with me here in berlin