i’ve done this with shirts :,-)

it is such a sweet feeling to miss someone in that way. i wish i had that in my life again~

I am terrified of taking out my recycling during the day because ONE time my landlord made an offhand comment about how there is a nosy older lady who lives in my building who is super picky about how everything is separated, and I have let this unconfirmed rumor completely dictate this little portion of my life. And so tonight, I obeyed my irrational fear of this person and took everything down just after midnight. By the time I unlocked the gate to the courtyard out back where the bins are, I realized I was completely blasted out of my skull on the edible I’d taken twenty minutes prior. I noticed also that it was quite warm out . . . I checked my phone and it was around 65 F, or 18 C for you civilized freaks. It felt like such a waste of a night to go back upstairs too soon. Lured out by the warm nighttime breeze, I went walking in my pajamas, and after some time I ended up two blocks from my building at the foot of an old fountain that dots the center of star-shaped roundabout.

The fountain is of course ringed with naked cross-legged cherubs, and I among them now. I had climbed over the the rim and perched myself there in the same pose as them. So powerful was the current of utter stupidity flowing through me, I did not have a single thought in my head just then. It was beautiful. I sat there silently for a half hour or so, watching my neighbors as they walked their dogs along the adjacent path leading to the cathedral, or else overheard their phone conversations as they encircled the dirt path in the grass around the fountain . . . and just before I left, two people whose common language was English appeared to be at the tail-end of a date that seemed like it was going all right. No one seemed to realize I was a real person sitting there.

Eventually I stood up from the fountain, which was dry for some reason, and began walking again. There are certain buildings in my neighborhood that I’m always interested in seeing at night because one day I hope to live in one of them, and I like to imagine what mine would look like at night. Sometimes people are really good at making their apartments look especially cozy at night . . . you see a place like this and you wonder at it. Tonight I saw this:

I mentioned last night that I’m watching the THREE COLOURS trilogy . . . and, for god’s sake, there they are in the windows! Blue, White, and Red! Tonight I had planned to watch White, and you really should not ignore signs like this, so I figured I really ought to get home and get to it. I turned the corner and kept walking. There was absolutely no one else outside and I felt that dreamlike feeling from yesterday again.

A block from my building, I saw a cat chilling on the sidewalk. I stopped and chilled with her for a while:

Back upstairs, I made coffee and poured a liter of cold water into my thermos. I sat down on the couch and watched the middle film, which I took to be The Funny One. I was into it. It was also the 111th movie I’ve watched since 2024 began.

(Wow! That’s the Palace of Culture and Science, which I saw with my own two eyes last weekend!)

The sun is now shining hatefully and at full blast behind my black-out curtains. Once again I have stayed up way too late . . . this makes the 150th day in a row. By the time I wake up, it will be almost 80 (26.5) degrees outside. Oh well! Time to keep practicing those ridiculous Polish Z’s until I can’t keep my eyes open anymore . . .

basically!

My sister and my friend Isabel and I walked to the grocery store at sundown . . . the temperature was perfectly warm, like the kind of warm where you can’t feel your own body in it. And the sky was yellow and pink and blue and there were hardly any people on the sidewalks. If you stopped and stood still, it was almost completely silent out. The sky darkened and warm air blew through the streets as if just before a rainstorm. I said to my sister that everything had that dreamlike feeling just then. It was so strange. There wasn’t anything ominous about it, just a sort of calmness. Nothing was wrong. Anyway, many hours later, the strange feeling I felt has persisted. It’s 5:45 am and I’ve covered the windows and I’m excited to go to sleep because I want to dream. Everyone keeps asking me about Poland and I keep thinking about Poland. I’m going to Belgium the weekend after next. After that I don’t know. I need to wake up tomorrow and finish this long letter I have been writing and finally mail everything I have on my desk. I need to hang curtains and buy a huge rug for my living room. I need plants and things to hang on the walls as well. What if a girl came in and saw that I have no plants and nothing on the walls yet? She’d think I was a total loser!

Tonight I started watching the THREE COLOURS trilogy . . . I’m going to finish the other two over the next two days. I was pretty moved by the first one. I myself am also in a “drag a bare knuckle across a brick wall on purpose until it bleeds” phase in my life, so I got it immediately. Man, it was really good. Kieślowski was the master.

Though yeah: I really ought to sleep. I feel so odd. I feel a way I have not felt in a long time.

EARLY THIS MORNING

. . . I took a cheap train from Warsaw back to Berlin . . . I was cold and exhausted for the entire five-hour trip, and I was stuck in the fucking middle seat, and so on, but the only thing I was unhappy about was not being in Warsaw anymore. I had gone to Poland not really having any idea what it would be like, and, AS IT TURNS OUT, I happen to love it. I attribute a lot of this to meeting and hanging out with someone there who reminded me of myself if only I were a billion times cooler. Wow!

Anyway: I will write about my newfound affection for the Poles soon, because of course I will. I took this picture of the Warsaw skyline this morning just before I left my little rental on the eighth floor of an old apartment building a few blocks from the central train station. I’ll tell you what, I was sadder than hell just then. On the walk to catch my train, I kept trying to think up ways I could stay a little longer, but surrendered finally when I realized how dead tired I was. And so I stood swaying drearily on the platform as the train pulled in at about a hundred miles per hour . . . and once stopped I stepped aboard a train car that was colder than a fucking meat locker. I sat down and put my sunglasses on and my hood up. I looked like the Unabomber and smelled like cigarettes. I nodded off a few times, maybe for a minute or so, only to wake up with a stiff neck on account of the seats having a 90-degree angle . . . and I’d watch the Polish countryside roll by outside the window at 120 miles per hour, and see people riding their bicycles along the narrow roads parallel to the train tracks, and the red rooftops of the houses in the little villages that dot the 530 miles between Warsaw and Berlin.

My body was completely shattered and I was so tired I wanted to cry. I felt a longing I had forgotten I could feel. AND YET STILL: I kept thinking that I’d had one of the best weekends I’ve had in a while. On paper it almost sounds unremarkable . . . I just did what I always do, which is to walk around and meet people and bear witness to it all. If you approach the world this way as I do, you sometimes get extremely lucky and trigger a series of strange connecting events leading to some previously unseen path. Then suddenly you’re Mr. Jackpots.

I don’t know . . . I guess you just had to be there. Fortunately for me, I was!

Well, for now: Good-night~!! ☆彡

Brother Tombo left this afternoon, and I have a train to catch to Warsaw in six hours or so, but I can’t sleep so I reckoned I may as well write a little something until I can . . .

The other night, after he and I watched CRIMES OF THE FUTURE, we decided we ought to watch something a little lighter, so I put on EVERY WHICH WAY BUT LOOSE. I have been evangelizing this film for years. Clint is a blue collar dude who also happens to be the undefeated bare-knuckle boxing champion of Los Angeles. And for reasons that are explained in two or three sentences of expository dialogue, Clint’s best friend is a full-grown male orangutan named Clyde who lives in the shed behind his house. (Clyde is not the point of the movie—he’s a character treated like any other character in the movie.) So Clint and Clyde and their friend / neighbor Orville hang out at the local honky tonk every night and pound beers. To be clear, Clyde the orangutan also drinks with them. And one night, Clint becomes enamored with a blonde country singer who plays for the bar crowd. The rest of the movie turns into a hang-out buddy road trip movie. Somewhere along the way, Clint and co. are pursued by a biker gang of bumbling Neo-Nazis. Listen, if that doesn’t do it for you, I don’t know what will.

Somehow EVERY WHICH WAY BUT LOOSE was the fourth highest grossing movie of 1978. It cost $5 million dollars to make and grossed $105 million. Adjusted for inflation, that’s nearly $500 million in 2024. Can you even imagine something like this happening today???

Anyway: We had a real good time watching it. We laughed our assess off. I don’t know how anyone could feel cynical about a movie where a heartsick Clint Eastwood hangs out with his best friends, one of whom being an orangutan, as they search the country for a woman who turned him every which way but loose. We certainly didn’t!

Next day, Tombo went out exploring, and I stayed home to work. He wandered around for hours just looking at the city, what with nearly everything being closed because of the holiday. He came home and told me he had got something for me along the way when passing an outdoor flea market. I could hardly believe my eyes when he took this from his bag:

ANY WHICH WAY YOU CAN is the sequel . . . it came out two years later and was the fifth highest grossing film of 1980. The whole gang is back and it’s a real good time at the movies. How this record of all records made its way over to Berlin, and how Tombo came to unearth it is pure serendipity. Praise the Lord. Both movies have great soundtracks, and even theme songs! Now all I gotta do is find its sister album . . .

In other news, the strawberry stands are going to open soon:

. . . and Tombo and I explored Museum Island on the first Sunday of the month when all the museums are free:

We also streamed HOLLOW MAN with McCune and his son (and my baby brother), Tower McCune:

This lead to a Paul Verhoeven kick in which Tombo and I spent the next two nights watching ELLE and BENEDETTA, both incredible. During the latter, I was blown away that I was watching a movie from 2021. Good lord, the dude is a master. Anyway, if you have a chance to see them, you absolutely should! What the hell else are you going to do? Sit around and grow old?

FINALLY: As part of my ongoing descent into a sort of Howard Hughesian madness, I bought a 40-pound bag of jasmine rice. Now I never have to leave the house again:

I really ought to sleep. I’ve got to wake my ass up in less than five hours and travel 360 miles across Germany and Poland to visit a city I know little about. I have decided that I will learn all about it by simply being there. Isn’t that always the best way to go about anything in life??

Sweet dreams~ ☆彡