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.

i saw this on reddit the other day . . . and for a split second i thought that maybe my sister had written it. and then i noticed the username lol

The other night I watched METROPOLITAN . . . man, I could not get into it. As well made as it is, I don’t know . . . even when it’s satire, WASPy stuff makes my skin crawl. It’s an hour and forty minutes of rich kids hanging out in their parents’ New York apartments, occasionally punctuated by scenes in which they take a 1950s taxi from one apartment to another. Though yeah, when the hero of the film finally outs himself as a total fraud and utters this line, I felt like barfing.

Listen: Heaven have mercy on us all—Presbyterians and Pagans alike—for we are all somehow dreadfully cracked about the head, and sadly need mending. That being said, nothing makes me feel more insane than the growing popularity of whatever this secondhand media absorption thing is . . . that is to say, this alarmingly commonplace thing people do now where they rely on AI or some asshole on YouTube in order to Experience Something By Proxy, to have it “explained” to them, whatever that thing may be . . . a novel, movie, TV show, video game, and on and on. It cannot be said that you truly experienced any of these things unless you lived with them . . . lived inside them! Otherwise you may as well start paying someone to go on vacation for you too.

I always remember that David Lynch quote about people watching movies on their phones. It is a similar sentiment:

Now if you’re playing the movie on a telephone, or on your computer, you will never in a trillion years experience the film. You’ll think you have experienced it, but you’ll be cheated. You’ll be experiencing weakness, and extreme putrefication of a potential experience in another world. So don’t let your friends, or some television advertisement, trick you into accepting weakness. Such a sadness. Power in that world is critical. Everything has been worked on to be a certain way. And if you don’t have a setup for your films, it’s a joke. It’s just the most sickening, horrifying joke. And this world is so troubled, and it’s such a sadness that you think you’ve seen a film on your fucking telephone. Get real.

Anyway . . . sorry for yet another lonely diatribe. It’s just that when I was watching that movie the other night, I remembered darkly that someone had once told me they don’t actually watch movies anymore, they just listen to people on YouTube talk about them, and that that “counted” as having watched the movie, that the two were the same. Dude . . . are you out of your fucking mind!!! lol

‘market square of warsaw by night’
józef pankiewicz

about a year ago i was in warsaw . . . i need to finally finish writing about it. man, that was an amazing trip and i wanna go back. i know a girl there and i’d like to see her again too ☆

frankenstein

For all men tragically great are made so through a certain morbidness. Be sure of this, O young ambition, all mortal greatness is but disease.

moby-dick

just fyi this is me