Day three of whatever this summer cold happens to be . . . although today I feel all right. THE ILLNESS has produced one positive outcome, which is that I have been able to sleep through the night without waking up every few hours. This is incredible to me. Last night I passed out on my couch around 1 am and when I opened my eyes next, I fully expected it to be 3:30 in the morning. Upon seeing there was light behind my velvet red curtains, I realized I was mistaken . . . it was 9:30 am, a perfectly reasonable time for a human being to wake up. I could hardly believe it! So I did what I assume most normal people feel compelled to do, which is to get up and make breakfast. As I drank whatever mediocre coffee it is I buy, I had the distinct sensation that there was no pain anywhere in my body and mind, and thus I supposed I was as dead as disco. So essential to my everyday human experience are physical and mental distress, the only logical explanation for their absence would would mean I had succumbed to the ultimate weakness of all God’s little creatures, which is death. Yes, and in that moment of blissful painlessness I suspected the world had finally got its revenge upon me for committing the sin of being born. And yet it was not so.

Listen, I don’t know how else to say it: I’ve accidentally gone and had myself a blissful-ass day. I took a bath, ate good food, exercised, sat on my balcony, read a book, watched a movie, played FINAL FANTASY XVI, got some Cold Beverages with my sister, talked to my friends, and walked around the block stoned to the bone. It is 65 degrees outside and pleasant AS IT CAN FUCKING BE. Now I’m sitting here drinking another cup of coffee and thinking about a movie I’m gonna watch after this. Wow! Maybe sometimes life really can be a precious little gift from heaven.

What is the cause of this sudden analgesia? I wonder. I’ve only taken a few ibuprofen in the last few days, and near as I can tell Germany does not have any sort of Day/Nyquil equivalent, so I’ve mostly been riding this thing out on my own. It really is just as simple as drinking as much tea and water as possible and sleeping as long as you can. If I have the time for it (and let’s face it, I always do), I usually drink a liter of water and then take a single dose of NyQuil and immediately go to sleep, staying that way for 14–15 hours. When I wake up, I’ve knocked out the hard part . . . you can’t feel it when you’re not awake. But without NyQuil here, I had to rely on my own internal wiring to handle the sedation, and once felled into that deep dark place where not even time exists, I let the elixir of life do the rest. By some miracle it worked.

In curing my sickness I have also cured myself of the sickness of mere existence, at least for a time. I have no doubt I will soon reawaken into the life-in-death where I usually find myself, that godawful place! SURE AS YOU WERE BORN, SO IT SHALL BE. For now I will do pull-ups in the hallway and roll around on the rug and think about calling ex-girlfriends. But I won’t do it! For God’s sake, don’t worry. I will simply enjoy this sensation of weightlessness by myself while I still can.

I will consult the bones . . .

Fairly confident I am two notches too stoned to handle subtitles right now, so that rules out most of these. And I’ve seen LATE AUGUST, EARLY SEPTEMBER . . . I specifically watched it because it has a hot French girl in it:

Perhaps tonight my movie criteria will be at least a little more sophisticated.

Anyway . . . I’ve made licorice tea (or LAKRITZTEE as The Germans call it), and I feel that good feeling, so it’s time to go. It’s time for my pale ass to watch a movie in the dark. I regard the Good Feeling like a divine guest . . . I will treasure its presence till the Darkness returns. And then. . . .

I am so sick . . . and I know who infected me! I was at the laundromat two days ago and someone near me kept sneezing and coughing. I did not think much about it then and now here I am, laid prone upon my couch with a fever. And being sick in the summer sucks . . . it feels so fundamentally wrong, like wearing socks in the shower.

At least I chewed through a bunch of movies I’ve been meaning to watch. I hit 215 today, for whatever that’s worth (less than nothing) . . .

Quite sleep deprived and shielded by dark sunglasses and SPF 50, I along with his many friends attended the 10th birthday party of my nephew Russ the Golden Retriever in Gleisdreieck Park here in beautiful Berlin ~

this is what i say (aloud) to myself every time i return to my apartment

heinrich schlitt

what can i say . . . guy loved gnome art!

frank frazetta

Back when I worked at Donut Farm, I had the opening shift on Fridays. I rolled my ass out of bed at 7:15 and washed my face and brushed my teeth and walked two minutes from my house to Donut Farm, which was a block away. For the first hour and a half, I was alone . . . I usually just put on fuckin classical music and drank coffee and read a book. Out the window I could see the Berkeley Hills, way the hell over there. Usually only a handful of people came in around that time, mostly to get coffee. I can think of no greater enemies of mine than the morning and the sun that comes with it, and yet it was not so bad because I only worked till 1:30, eating as much free food and drinking as much coffee as I liked, and then I could go home and sleep for a few hours and still have the rest of the day to do whatever it is I do with my days.

And on those Fridays, I worked with a cool dude named Neil who came in around nine. He was the cook. Neil was from Austin and had given up his life in the mountains of Northern California where he had sold weed for several years. He said he made a lot of money but he was always working and having to hang around a bunch of assholes, and there was the ever-present phantom threat that the ATF was spying on him. So he went straight and worked at Donut Farm of all places. He drove a huge white truck that essentially had monster truck tires on it.

On Neil’s huge bicep, he had a tattoo of a penguin standing next to a bowling pin with a broken heart hovering above them. I once said to Neil: “Neil, I hate to ask what a tattoo means, because I know that is an annoying question, and also it’s not as though a tattoo has to mean anything at all. But I’ve got to know the significance of the broken-hearted penguin and the bowling pin, if any.”

To which Neil replied: “You’ve obviously never done PCP before.”

I did not inquire any further. I love not knowing what that means.

Anyway: Somewhere along the line, Neil and I decided Fridays should be dedicated to Black Sabbath. And so we created Black Sabbath Fridays, and we played all nine Ozzy albums in chronological order from BLACK SABBATH to NEVER SAY DIE! . . . which clocks in at nearly six hours of Black Sabbath, and so unless I had to stay later and help the second server who came in at 10:30, I usually only got through SABBATH BLOODY SABBATH, which is my favorite one . . . though yeah: it was a cool thing we did.

Mutually and without discussing it, we shared a sacred ritual for “Changes” . . . we did not talk while it was on! Hey man I guess we just held a certain reverence for it. It’s one of my favorite Sabbath songs.

Yesterday when I read that Ozzy had died, I put it on. Ozzy was one of my favorite dudes. He was like Jack Nicholson and Marlon Brando and Orson Welles in that he seemed like a dude who embodied the joy of being alive. I will miss him.

Last night I watched the second part of THE DECLINE OF WESTERN CIVILIZATION for the first time in many years . . . and with the exception of Ozzy, Lemmy, Alice Cooper, and Dave Mustaine, everyone else in the documentary comes off like an insufferable egotistical asshole (almost all of whom are total nobodies now). Ozzy’s segments are just him making breakfast and talking about his life and being in Black Sabbath. He comes off like a cool and decent dude. He also has the final line in the movie, which is the best line:

Farewell my brother!!!

now all my days
are filled with tears
wish i could go back
and change these years

of all the mental defects i possess, i think my favorite has got to be when my brain produces a greatest hits compilation of all the many instances i have made a total ass of myself, which it chooses to show me either just before i go to sleep or as soon as i wake up LOL

i can’t look away either . . . it’s like that scene in A CLOCKWORK ORANGE when alex is strapped to a chair in a straight jacket wearing that eyeball-opening-machine and forced to watch insane shit in order to deprogram him from his psychotic antisocial tendencies!!

uh . . . oop’s!