Today was Saturday . . . not that days of the week mean much to me anymore. Yet I still endeavor to treat weekends like a Normal Person might, which is to say I use them to Get Stuff Done, and also I allow myself to be even lazier than I usually am. So saying, I cleaned my entire apartment, watered my flowers, and went to the laundromat down the street to clean the filth out of all my black clothes . . . I also managed to knock out thirty or so pages from CRIME AND PUNISHMENT, which I am trying to finish before I fly back the US in a few weeks. It’s a thick-ass book, and it will take up too much space in my bag, so I must attempt to blow through it in what time I have left. I don’t yet know when I will be back in Berlin, so I can’t very well leave it halfway through, which is exactly where I am. Only 325 pages to go . . .

Once I had got home and dropped off my laundry, I went back outside and walked down to my corner späti and got an ice cream cone. On the short walk back to my building, I noticed that it was so beautiful out, a perfect day really, warm and breezy, and everyone was sitting at cafes and on walks, all of them visibly happy except for me. I knew that once I ascended the many stairs back to my high tower, I would sit on my balcony and eat my stupid little ice cream cone. But just then I thought that, if I had something to do that involved other people, I would go in the direction of them and feel much better about everything. It would be nice to talk to someone and not think so much, but I have been ghosted a dozen times this summer, and so I have surrendered to being alone. Today was the anniversary of the absolute worst day of my entire life, my being prone to bad days which would fill a gargantuan list I could wrap around the whole world at least twice, but August 9th is without a doubt the king of all my bad days. If you don’t know why, I won’t say . . . it’s too painful. I have already spent most of the day crying about it. I don’t want to end this day on the same note if I can help it . . .

Though yeah: what I would give to have friends here! I thought that today. I would love to sit in a park or go to a bar or whatever the hell else. Often days pass and sometimes whole weeks where I do not utter a single spoken word to anyone other than myself. It is a melancholy way to live. I think maybe there is only so long a person can live like that. I am living beneath a dark and humid constellation. It was not my choice to have ended up this reclusive, my fate having been resigned to filling the shoes of Howard Hughes Junior (so far no pissing into mason jars) . . . And yet here I am a friendless loser in my own city, and watching from afar as my friends on a faraway continent have what appears to be a summer of total contentment and surrounded by other people.

I am reminded of the words of one of the old masters:

. . . Love and confidence had changed of a sudden to hate and deadly enmity and the neighbors saw me go with pitying scorn. It was then that my solitude had its beginning. Years of hardship and bitterness went by. I had built up the ideal of a new life, inspired by the asceticism of the intellect. I had attained a certain serenity and elevation of life once more, submitting myself to the practice of abstract thought and to a rule of austere meditation. But this mold, too, was broken and lost at one blow all its exalted and noble intent. A whirl of travel drove me afresh over the earth; fresh sufferings were heaped up, and fresh guilt. And every occasion when a mask was torn off, an ideal broken, was preceded by this hateful vacancy and stillness, this deathly constriction and loneliness and unrelatedness, this waste and empty hell of lovelessness and despair, such as I had now to pass through once more.

Yeah.

Anyway . . . I remain alone. I am a ghost living in a rectangular room high above West Berlin. I feel a sort of desperation and longing for intimacy that, despite all my efforts, I cannot get my hands on. At least I have a bathtub and bunch of books and a gigantic TV, and tea and coffee and candles, for whatever that’s worth . . .

Tonight around four in the morning I heard a wind outside. It started out small and then swirled around into something huge very quickly, almost like a hurricane descending from the sky. I don’t know what it is about the back of my building, but it’s almost like a wind tunnel sometimes. I paused FINAL FANTASY XVI and went out onto my balcony to move my flower boxes beneath the balcony wall in order to shield them from the wind. This is my last month with them as they will die once fall comes around, not long now, and I’ll be on the other side of the planet. Still, I have to protect them while I still can. With the wind still blowing fiercely I looked up at the sky and saw the full moon in Aquarius, my moon and that of my Aquarian brothers and sisters, and felt all right for a moment. And then I remembered everything else. The good feeling turned to vapor and vanished and I went back into the darkness of my apartment where, having no alternative, I seem doomed to languish in this waste and empty hell of lovelessness and despair.

. . . for the love of his neighbor was as deeply in him as the hatred for himself, and so his whole life was an example that love of one’s neighbor is not possible without love of oneself, and that self-hate is really the same thing as sheer egoism, and in the long run breeds the same cruel isolation and despair . . .