Recently I have not been able to sleep for more than an hour or so. I have also not really left my apartment nor seen sunlight in weeks. I certainly have not had any meaningful interactions with human civilization. And forget about camaraderie and intimacy! Berlin is a city of four million people and I may as well be living on the fucking moon.

My pallid complexion and downcast expression say it all: I got a pretty bad case of the Summertime Blues.

The other night I bought my ticket back to the US. On August 27th I fly from Berlin to Amsterdam to Washington, DC. They say I will be gone again for some time, and who’s to say how long exactly. Right now I have only a vague idea of where I’ll be and when . . . or why.

Currently I am completely unmoored from reality, and my next adventure will not bring me any closer to it. At least I won’t be alone . . . I’ll be with my friends pretty much everywhere I go, minus that good aloneness you feel when traveling from one place to the next. It’s like the fella said: there’s no prettier sight than looking back on a town you left behind. I am so excited to feel that sensation again every few days, knowing there is always someone waiting for me at the end of the road. I will still be treading phantom-like on the crater rim of reality, dropping into other people’s lives and then dropping out again, never having a truly tangible one of my own. But there are worse fates. I’m currently living one.

For the next five and a half weeks, I will endeavor to read as much as I can, write as much as I can, watch as many movies as I can, and on and on, till it is time to board that evening flight across the Atlantic. And then I’ll go about wandering the earth again now that I am imprisoned in what feels like the epilogue of my life. As far as spending time with other people here, I won’t count on it. I give up. I’ll just have to settle for seeing the citizens of Berlin go about their day from behind the glass of my neighborhood laundromat where, alone and residually stoned and fried by insomnia, I do laundry at seven in the morning because my lifestyle is arguably insane and at least a little bit sad.