Today it was nearly 80 degrees . . . and for those of you in a more civilized part of the world, that’s about 26.5 C. I went strutting through my neighborhood around 5 and got groceries on account of it being a public holiday tomorrow, so all the stores will be closed. I stocked up on fruit and oat milk and church candles. I go through a lot of that stuff.

Anyway, no matter how grim I may grow about the mouth from time to time, I always feel all right again, at least for a little while, when I step out from my high tower and mix with the animals. Not since Austin have I truly had an honest-to-god neighborhood like this, one where I can walk to Stuff, and have my own Places, and so on. I have my own coffeeshop and bar and corner store (called “Lucky Beetle” in English), and three grocery stories, one of which being a 24-hour one, an essential asset for a hopeless nightcrawler freak like me. I even have four whole train lines which will take me to the city center and the farthest reaches on the Berlin Ring within 15-20 minutes. Wow!

And I know a fair amount of my neighbors, and recognize all the people who live and work within a five-block radius of my building. It is though they operate on a sort of track . . . they have daily Truman Show routines. I find this comforting. And unlike, say, Kreuzberg or Neukölln or Friedrichshain, and I have lived in all three, there are practically no tourists to be found, and there isn’t chaos everywhere. I’ve never even witnessed a crime here, which I came to be absolutely numbed to in Oakland, what with my bearing witness to at least one every time I left the god damn house.

There are TREES and ANIMALS all around, including foxes (!), which I often see at night by the cathedral in the square across the street—the square where, every weekend, there’s a huge market full of stalls selling flowers and chocolate and fresh honey and any kind of food you can think of. God help me, we also have PARKS, and they’re all really good. I gotta have a good park nearby, somewhere to get stoned and go strolling through at night, or else I’ll bust.

What I’m trying to say is Schöneberg feels like a town from EarthBound. To wit:

Nice, huh???

The other day, brother McCune inquired thusly:

. . . to which I replied: “Come on in, brother, the water is fine.”

Later on, back at home and once the sun had gone down, I was sitting at my desk working on who even knows, and I had my windows popped open at the top, and smelled a bonfire and heard people talking down below. I went out onto my balcony, which overlooks tall trees where little red squirrels live, and saw a group of people encircling a fire beneath a thicket in the neighboring yard. Everyone was just hanging out and feeling good. It looked nice as hell. I took a picture with a long exposure, which ended up looking like an impressionist painting:

They do this sometimes . . . you can count on it in the evening of any warm night here, and most holidays. I love it when my apartment smells like a bonfire, so I let it in. Sometimes I get a strange notion to join them, but I don’t know if that would be imposing or not.

Once, nearly ten years ago now, when I was on a bust assignment in Los Angeles with my cousin Jack, we parked our decommissioned police car, our Halloween costume of a car, on Ocean Boulevard in Santa Monica. We downed some mushrooms and walked down to Santa Monica Beach, and passed through the gloom beneath the pier with the lighted ferris wheel to get to Venice Beach. The stuff had kicked in by then, and we lay on the warm sand at midnight and looked up at the undulating pink sky and listened to the ocean for a while. Eventually we started to get thirsty, so we made our way up the beach to get back onto Ocean Boulevard to find a corner store. And I remember there was a group of people sitting quietly around a little beach fire. I was of course on a different planet inside my head just then, and feeling more affable than usual on account of that, I approached them to say hello. I remember them being so kind to me, and not treating me like some weird freak who had come to bother them. After a minute or so I told them to have a good night, and they said the same, and then Jack and I ambled back onto the main throughway to chug a liter of water each before moving on to a nearby park.

Though yeah: It would probably be all right if I went over there, but it wouldn’t be like I was passing through or anything . . . I’d have to go behind their building to get there. And maybe they would feel the pressure to switch to English to accommodate me. Often Germans will speak to each other in English when I am around, even when they aren’t talking to me directly, so that I don’t feel alienated. My friends in Turkey did this as well when I visited Ankara. I always appreciate this. But no matter: I let the Bonfire People be. It is nice enough to be in proximity to it, to hear them down there and to have that smell in my apartment for a few hours. Some days my life is a complete disaster, and I suppose that it’s over, that I have been cursed and cursed again, and then other days the hex seems to be temporarily lifted or else paused, and I remember the bad neighborhoods where I have lived and despaired, and feel lucky as hell that I have exchanged them for this one, hopefully once and for all. I’ll take sun or fire through the leaves any day. You know?

Good-night~ ☆彡

nicholson and dennis hopper and michelle phillips at an oscars after party in LA, 1970

i love it . . .

damn!! clint looks cool as hell here lol

My old friend Tombo is visiting later this week . . . I haven’t seen that son of a bitch since summer 2019, when he was heartbroken over some girl and crashing on my couch in Northern California. He and Jackson and I spent all of June watching movies and playing Final Fantasy Tactics and going on walks at night. Lord, Jackson got us pizza from Sliver twice a week. It was a beautiful time. Maybe that was the last good summer I ever had, now that I think about it.

Anyway: The guy’s never been to Berlin, so I’ll show him everything I know during the Dracula Hours. He’s on his own during the day. I reckon we’ll get stoned to the bone and watch movies as well. How could you stay at my place and NOT expect to have a real good time once the sun sets??

After that: I will go to Warsaw. I have been meaning to go to Warsaw for years, and so now I will finally do it. I want to see that place though I don’t exactly know why . . . I guess I just like the Poles is all, and I think Polish sounds cool. Is that a good enough reason? It’s a five and a half hour train ride from here, which is not too long and just long enough at the same time. I know exactly one person in Warsaw, and it’d be real nice to see her. You know?

OK, I have about two hours of night left before the sun comes up, so I gotta do what I can with it. And then . . . .

whoa lol

i miss judy so much. she was the only other person i knew who stayed up all night like me. i remember we went on night walks during the pandemic when the streets in berkeley were completely empty. judy has been dead for over two years now. i’m still haunted by the fact that i did not drive over to her house when my texts went undelivered . . . i remember feeling like something was off. it would have been too late anyway, but i think about it from time to time.

this is the last thing she ever sent me, and it was in the middle of the night. she never got my reply. rest in peace, judy

i subscribe to this belief as well (and i always live in the dark)

Mary Shelley wrote of Percy Shelley’s doppelgänger, which he and another woman had encountered just before his death:

. . . talking it over the next morning he told me that he had had many visions lately — he had seen the figure of himself which met him as he walked on the terrace and said to him — “How long do you mean to be content” — No very terrific words & certainly not prophetic of what has occurred. But Shelley had often seen these figures when ill; but the strangest thing is that Mrs. Williams saw him. Now Jane, though a woman of sensibility, has not much imagination & is not in the slightest degree nervous — neither in dreams or otherwise. She was standing one day, the day before I was taken ill, [June 15] at a window that looked on the Terrace with Trelawny — it was day — she saw as she thought Shelley pass by the window, as he often was then, without a coat or jacket — he passed again — now as he passed both times the same way — and as from the side towards which he went each time there was no way to get back except past the window again (except over a wall twenty feet from the ground) she was struck at seeing him pass twice thus & looked out & seeing him no more she cried — “Good God can Shelley have leapt from the wall?…. Where can he be gone?” Shelley, said Trelawny — “No Shelley has past — What do you mean?” Trelawny says that she trembled exceedingly when she heard this & it proved indeed that Shelley had never been on the terrace & was far off at the time she saw him.

My friend Cera is visiting Berlin. Cera is from Vancouver, the Canadian one, and I’ve known her for nearly decade . . . but we did not meet in person until last October when I was in LA:

. . . and again when I was there in December for Secret Reasons:

And now, hey presto, here she is in Berlin. Yesterday we went to Babylon Theater to see NOSFERATU with a live orchestra. And to celebrate 4/20, we both popped a nice and gentle 5mg gummy during the opening credits. Wow! It was an amazing thing to behold, to have a whole host of musicians not twenty feet away from us the entire time, and the whole thing certainly elevated to some upper echelon on account of the good stuff juicing through us. When the credits rolled and the lights came on, everyone clapped for the orchestra for a solid five minutes, and then Cera and I bolted for the door.

Back outside, we stood beneath the lights of the marquee and wondered at it all. Too bad it was cold as hell last night . . . the warm spring weather we’d had ended the day Cera got here. It even hailed one day last week. But no matter, we ZIPPED UP and headed to Kottbusser Tor, The Filth Zone, to visit my old friends at Fahimi, where we were treated like royalty and given fancy cocktails. I don’t know anything about cocktails on account of I’m a huge uncultured idiot, but I drank what was given to me, and it was very good indeed.

Afterwards I walked Cera back to her friend’s place in Kreuzberg, not far from where I lived in 2019 and 2020, just before the pandemic hit. I had not been to that particular part of Kreuzberg in some time, and after I’d hugged her and said goodbye, I walked around for a little bit and felt a sort of sadness at that. It really was a different time is all, not so long ago but also a long time ago . . . and so much darkness had come between me and the time I had spent there. The wind was cold and I was alone on the street just then. Everything felt unfamiliar and a little sinister. I shivered and turned up my fur collar and headed towards the U7 train which would take me home.

. . . just some ways i’ve been FEELIN lately~