I walked down to the fountain again tonight . . . that’s where the nearest Deutsche Post box is. I mailed one postcard to Warsaw and another to New York City. I’ve mailed a lot of postcards to a lot of different places, but that’s the first one I’ve ever sent to Poland.

Since I am the self-declared Dracula of Schöneberg, I of course did this at 2:45 in the morning. It was 66 F / 19 C out, and there was a warm breeze and no one else was out on the street, so I kept walking. I almost felt like I had no choice. I strolled over to the pathway that leads to the huge cathedral by the U-bahn station and sat down by the pingpong table. A black cat was playing in some tall grass nearby and I meowed at her and she turned to look at me.

My dad called me just then because he knew I’d be awake. He was pretty bummed out about a few things I’ll maybe write about later . . . and so I walked into the little forested court where they play a sport that I honestly don’t even know, and I lay down on the cement with my legs at an angle and listened to him talk. He sounded like he needed some comfort so I tried to comfort him. He said, “I wish I were there right now. It sounds so nice.” I said, “Yeah . . . it’s a real all-you-can-eat buffet of niceness.”

Now I’m home writing some letters . . . I can hear birds in the trees outside my balcony. The sun rises in exactly one hour. It seems like every week that fuckin thing rises 15 minutes earlier than it did the week before. This is seriously threatening my lifestyle, but it sure as hell beats winter in Berlin, when the sun rises at 8 am. That is true misery. In contrast, this is a mildly annoying luxury.

Good-night~ ☆彡

I’ve watched probably thirty or so Clint Eastwood films in the last month, either ones he starred in or directed, and many of them both. Clint turns 94 next week, same day as Laura, and I reckon I was paying tribute to him in some way. Listen: I love the guy. He’s one of my favorite dudes.

Thing is, I’m running out of Easwtood movies! But I finally sat down and watched HONKYTONK MAN, which I’d never even heard of before. It’s not a hidden masterpiece or anything, but it’s funny and often beautiful and wholly sincere, as is pretty much everything he’s directed. For all its sweetness, it’s probably also the biggest bummer of them all . . . when it ended, I thought: “Clint!!!”

Anyway, as for me, I’m very careful about saying that thing to someone, lest I miscalculate it. It’s easy to do that. I think once a very long time ago now I dropped the L bomb when I wasn’t fully there on account of a guilt I had that the girl had said it first . . . she’d waited some time for me to say it back and I knew it was hurting her that I had not. I know she meant it and when I said it, I meant it too, so maybe that’s all that matters. I certainly didn’t lie about it. What good would that have done us? Many years later I wonder if it’s childish to even consider a distinction between the “types” of love anyway. But if I were to borrow someone else’s words to describe what exactly it is I felt, these are the ones I would use:

. . . The young woman smiled dreamily as she went on about the storm, and he looked at her in amazement and something akin to shame: she had experienced something beautiful, and he had failed to experience it with her. The two ways in which their memories reacted to the evening storm sharply delimit love and nonlove.

By the word “nonlove” I do not wish to imply that he took a cynical attitude to the young woman, that, as present-day parlance has it, he looked upon her as a sex object; on the contrary, he was quite fond of her, valued her character and intelligence, and was willing to come to her aid if she ever needed him. He was not the one who behaved shamefully towards her; it was his memory, for it was his memory that, unbeknown to him, had excluded her from the sphere of love.

I could love someone again. I’m fully capable of it now. Truthfully I don’t think I was for a long stretch of time. So at least I’ve got that going for me.

‘sacred and profane love’, giovanni baglione

22 may 2024 a.d., 02:16 CET
berlin, deutschland, europe, earth

lol

i was in line to get one of the worst burritos of my life when i saw this. it felt like the good lord had smiled upon me lol

I have not had my own balcony in a long time . . . and now I do!

this is me

Yesterday I walked to the späti near my place to grab a package that had been delivered there. In Germany, the delivery guy will give your package to someone else if you’re not home (and oftentimes even if you are), usually a neighbor you’ve never even heard of before. Otherwise they take it to any nearby store that accepts deliveries, which is pretty much all of them. I’ve had to pick up packages from hair salons and coffeeshops. But more often than not, they drop them off at the closest späti.

A späti, which is a cute nickname for spätkauf (literally “late shop”), is a sort of corner store. It’s a Berlin Thing. There’s a späti every thirty feet or so, many with their own unique personalities, and they resemble American gas station convenience stores. At minimum, they will have food and drinks and sell cigarettes and lotto tickets and aspirin and condoms and iPhone chargers, and on and on, but sometimes you find a really nice späti that has hot food and beer on tap. There are spätis with full-blown restaurant areas or little rooms in the back where you can play slot machines and smoke cigarettes with old dudes until the sun comes up. Most of them will have tables and chairs outside, and people really do hang out there, especially on weekends. In the US, there are signs posted everywhere saying you can’t loiter outside a 7-11, for instance, or else suffer the police . . . but in Berlin, chillin around a späti is an honest-to-god Thing To Do on a Friday night.

My neighborhood späti, which is about a hundred feet from my front door, is named after an insect and is run by a small family. They have fresh pastries every morning and an espresso machine. Usually in the afternoon there will be a bunch of old dudes in there playing chess or cards. You can always find the neighborhood homeless dude drinking coffee there too. And all day every day, people sit on the picnic tables outside as though it were a cafe in Paris. Listen: I love it.

For whatever reason, this particular package was not sent to my späti, but to the one next to the looming cathedral by the U-bahn station. I had never been to this one. Inside, a nice lady behind the counter said hello to me. I asked her in German if she spoke English, and she said, “Of course I do.” I told her I had a package there and handed her my Austrian ID. She looked at it, then raised her head up to compare it to my face, and smiled. She leaned down and pulled out a small package with my last name written on the side.

She said: “I remember this package specifically because you live in the same building as my mother. I’m there all the time, so I’m surprised I’ve never seen you.”

I told her I lived like Count Dracula, and unless she was in the stairwell after midnight, it wasn’t likely that she’d have seen me. I said: “Well, I’m on the fourth floor, so if you ever need me to check on her, just let me know . . .” And you know what: I meant it. Why not?

I said goodbye and went back out onto the street. It was so beautiful outside that I wanted to cry. It was breezy and balmy, a real summer day. Despite being utterly cursed until the day I die, and a sort of disaster of a person in some regards, I have somehow fallen ass-backgrounds into living in one of the nicest neighborhoods I can think of. And I don’t even pay much money to live here! I thought this as I walked down tree-lined streets filled with happy people and lined with restaurants and coffeeshops and pet stores and spätis. I thought: “You really pulled it off, you dumb son of a bitch . . .”

Anyway: It’s always nice to have a reason to visit another späti. I have so many of them within a half-mile radius, some of them quite nice, and for god’s sake I want to see all of them. As someone whose only weakness is the sun, I of course like stores that stay open real late, and so of course I love spätis. Seeing one glowing in the darkness on an empty street in the middle of the night is a source of comfort when you’re feeling rotten as hell and wandering around, AS I AM WONT TO DO. And knowing that I can stroll inside at 3 am ripped out of my skull on psychedelics and buy a €2 beer and a novelty lighter that says “Livin’ el Dream” without judgement? Well baby, then aloha~

the sun rises at like 4:30 am here in the summer . . . it drives me nuts. those are my dracula hours!!

also, why not: here are two quotes from THE SUN ALSO RISES . . .

It is awfully easy to be hard-boiled about everything in the daytime, but at night it is another thing.

and

I did not care what it was all about. All I wanted to know was how to live in it. Maybe if you found out how to live in it you learned from that what is was all about.