damn!! clint looks cool as hell here lol

My old friend Tombo is visiting later this week . . . I haven’t seen that son of a bitch since summer 2019, when he was heartbroken over some girl and crashing on my couch in Northern California. He and Jackson and I spent all of June watching movies and playing Final Fantasy Tactics and going on walks at night. Lord, Jackson got us pizza from Sliver twice a week. It was a beautiful time. Maybe that was the last good summer I ever had, now that I think about it.

Anyway: The guy’s never been to Berlin, so I’ll show him everything I know during the Dracula Hours. He’s on his own during the day. I reckon we’ll get stoned to the bone and watch movies as well. How could you stay at my place and NOT expect to have a real good time once the sun sets??

After that: I will go to Warsaw. I have been meaning to go to Warsaw for years, and so now I will finally do it. I want to see that place though I don’t exactly know why . . . I guess I just like the Poles is all, and I think Polish sounds cool. Is that a good enough reason? It’s a five and a half hour train ride from here, which is not too long and just long enough at the same time. I know exactly one person in Warsaw, and I’d be real nice to see her. You know?

OK, I have about two hours of night left before the sun comes up, so I gotta do what I can with it. And then . . . .

whoa lol

i miss judy so much. she was the only other person i knew who stayed up all night like me. i remember we went on night walks during the pandemic when the streets in berkeley were completely empty. judy has been dead for over two years now. i’m still haunted by the fact that i did not drive over to her house when my texts went undelivered . . . i remember feeling like something was off. it would have been too late anyway, but i think about it from time to time.

this is the last thing she ever sent me, and it was in the middle of the night. she never got my reply. rest in peace, judy

i subscribe to this belief as well (and i always live in the dark)

Mary Shelley wrote of Percy Shelley’s doppelgänger, which he and another woman had encountered just before his death:

. . . talking it over the next morning he told me that he had had many visions lately — he had seen the figure of himself which met him as he walked on the terrace and said to him — “How long do you mean to be content” — No very terrific words & certainly not prophetic of what has occurred. But Shelley had often seen these figures when ill; but the strangest thing is that Mrs. Williams saw him. Now Jane, though a woman of sensibility, has not much imagination & is not in the slightest degree nervous — neither in dreams or otherwise. She was standing one day, the day before I was taken ill, [June 15] at a window that looked on the Terrace with Trelawny — it was day — she saw as she thought Shelley pass by the window, as he often was then, without a coat or jacket — he passed again — now as he passed both times the same way — and as from the side towards which he went each time there was no way to get back except past the window again (except over a wall twenty feet from the ground) she was struck at seeing him pass twice thus & looked out & seeing him no more she cried — “Good God can Shelley have leapt from the wall?…. Where can he be gone?” Shelley, said Trelawny — “No Shelley has past — What do you mean?” Trelawny says that she trembled exceedingly when she heard this & it proved indeed that Shelley had never been on the terrace & was far off at the time she saw him.

My friend Cera is visiting Berlin. Cera is from Vancouver, the Canadian one, and I’ve known her for nearly decade . . . but we did not meet in person until last October when I was in LA:

. . . and again when I was there in December for Secret Reasons:

And now, hey presto, here she is in Berlin. Yesterday we went to Babylon Theater to see NOSFERATU with a live orchestra. And to celebrate 4/20, we both popped a nice and gentle 5mg gummy during the opening credits. Wow! It was an amazing thing to behold, to have a whole host of musicians not twenty feet away from us the entire time, and the whole thing certainly elevated to some upper echelon on account of the good stuff juicing through us. When the credits rolled and the lights came on, everyone clapped for the orchestra for a solid five minutes, and then Cera and I bolted for the door.

Back outside, we stood beneath the lights of the marquee and wondered at it all. Too bad it was cold as hell last night . . . the warm spring weather we’d had ended the day Cera got here. It even hailed one day last week. But no matter, we ZIPPED UP and headed to Kottbusser Tor, The Filth Zone, to visit my old friends at Fahimi, where we were treated like royalty and given fancy cocktails. I don’t know anything about cocktails on account of I’m a huge uncultured idiot, but I drank what was given to me, and it was very good indeed.

Afterwards I walked Cera back to her friend’s place in Kreuzberg, not far from where I lived in 2019 and 2020, just before the pandemic hit. I had not been to that particular part of Kreuzberg in some time, and after I’d hugged her and said goodbye, I walked around for a little bit and felt a sort of sadness at that. It really was a different time is all, not so long ago but also a long time ago . . . and so much darkness had come between me and the time I had spent there. The wind was cold and I was alone on the street just then. Everything felt unfamiliar and a little sinister. I shivered and turned up my fur collar and headed towards the U7 train which would take me home.

. . . just some ways i’ve been FEELIN lately~

in a cartoonish way this is what being alive feels like to me lol

For fifteen years, whenever I had a nightmare, or Dante had a nightmare, we could wake each other from them. They say cats have extrasensory abilities, or some such thing, and I believe it . . . I’ve seen evidence of it my whole life. You know, like cats can sense ghosts and impending earthquakes, and can tell if you’re sick or sad, and will come to you when they sense this. Once, when I had strep throat and was the sickest I’d ever been in my life, Dante stayed by my side for all eight days of it:

There were countless times I cried alone in the dark in my bedroom, and Dante would push my door open and come sit beside me. Leila said he did the same thing when she was crying in my bed when I was at work. I’m tearing up now just thinking about it. Dante was such a sweet cat.

And now I don’t have Dante to come and sit quietly beside me when I’m sadder than hell, and look up to me with love even though he couldn’t fully understand the complexity of what was happening, and all the better for it. This was such a comfort to me. These days I have nightmares pretty much every night, and I wake up in fright. So real are my nightmares that it takes me an hour after I wake to fully divorce them from reality. I didn’t have to deal with this when Dante was still alive, because he saved me from them. And similarly when I heard Dante making little sounds in his sleep, and twitching his face because he was having a bad dream, I would gently shake him and call his name until he woke up.

How did Dante know I was having a nightmare? I guess it was just one of those extrasensory cat abilities, and his being attuned to my moods and demeanors. Now I wake from a nightmare into a different one . . . an empty apartment where he isn’t sitting on my chest and gently pawing at my face so I won’t feel scared anymore. Every day was a good day when I got to wake up to Dante. What is my life now? Endless nightmares with no one to pull me out again.