I cannot forget Carcosa where black stars hang in the heavens; where the shadows of men’s thoughts lengthen in the afternoon, when the twin suns sink into the lake of Hali; and my mind will bear for ever the memory of the Pallid Mask. I pray God will curse the writer, as the writer has cursed the world with this beautiful, stupendous creation, terrible in its simplicity, irresistible in its truth—a world which now trembles before the King in Yellow.

ich bin ein berliner

LAST NIGHT AT MIDNIGHT

. . . the timezone changed in North America, sleepers there robbed of a whole hour. . . and yet it has not changed over here in Europe. Until March 30th, I am only five hours ahead of my friends on the East Coast, six hours head of my friends in the Midwest and the Heartland, seven hours ahead of my friends in the Four Corners region, and eight hours ahead of my friends in California and the Pacific Northwest, and on and on.

On account of my having an insane sleep schedule that would make a fuckin vampire blush, the time difference is not so much a big deal to me . . . though why not: I’ll take one more hour with everyone back home as long as I can. Curiously, Europe falls back weeks earlier, but springs forward weeks later. So this “plus or minus one hour” thing is a twice-yearly event, at least for now.

They’re always talking about getting rid of daylight saving time, but it never comes to pass. What they need to do is abolish standard time and make daylight saving time the default. So what if you wake up in darkness in the fall and winter? You’re going to be miserable anyway. As for me: I’ll take that extra hour of sunlight in the evening. And I don’t even like the sun! Give it to me! I want it!!

THE RUMORS ARE TRUE: The Berlin winter is a bleak and arduous time all here must endure . . . unless of course you split for the Canary Islands or Italy or Portugal, or some such place, and ride it out there till mid-March. For the less fortunate, and I among them, we have no choice but to button our winter coats all the way up to our fucking noses, and make our apartments as comfortable and cheerful as possible till the planet rotates around the sun in the direction of brighter days. Thing is, it’s not so much the cold that kills you, it is the blanket of somber greyness which pervades the entire city. I can tolerate and even dig a winter’s day if the sun is out a little . . . give it to me!

And then, and then . . . at the beginning of March, if you’re lucky, you’ll wind up with a few 60-65 degree (that’s around 16-18 C for the people in the box seats) day in a row, an unbroken streak of dreamlike days, and you feel a little hope in your heart. Your brace yourself for the insanity of the wild card German March, when it can be warm and sunny one minute, and snowing and hailing the next, only to go back to a sunny day, or else some strange unknown weather pattern of which you had not previously been aware. But even this too shall soon pass. Eventually the warm days are reliably consistent and all your winter Berlin misery will have paid off: now the city is your friend again, and it’s all yours in which to dwell beautifully till next November, when the Dark Days return . . .

Meanwhile, the Berlin summer transforms Berlin into the most beautiful city in the world, as far as I’m concerned. The days are long and fair, and with the exception of a Freak Week of exceptionally hot weather, it is pleasant outside day and night. It’s so beautiful you almost want to kill yourself. In the Bay Area, even in dead-center summer, you never really get a warm night. You can’t swim at night, for instance, which is something we always used to do when I lived in Austin . . . hopping the fences of apartment complexes where we did not live, sometimes laughing our asses off on acid, and swimming for hours beneath the huge starry Texas sky. And when you did pull yourself out the water, you dried almost instantly, such was the friendliness of the summer nights there, even if the days were deadlier than hell.

And so it is same here in Berlin at night, especially once you get to the middle of June and into July. At its peak, Berlin gets nearly 17 hours of sunlight, and the sun does not set until nearly 10 pm. To be clear: the sun has already begun setting at seven or eight, and so it is not as though it feels like high noon. It is a sort of gentle downward slope into nighttime. As my friend Katie put it: a long sunset makes the world feel a little safer.

DIG THIS:

As I have opined many times during the long history of this very website, the sun has since my earliest childhood made an enemy of me. The sun struck first. On a day with a UV index over three, I begin to burn very quickly . . . my skin essentially smoking like the vampires in NEAR DARK. Fortunately Berlin never really gets above a four, and so the white-cast zinc oxide sunscreen intended for babies that I use is powerful enough to repel both UVA and UVB rays until I can retreat back to the shadows, like a desperado under the eaves. Shielded by it, I have never once burned. I took this stuff all the way to the limit when I visited my friends Demet and Ege and Aysu in Ankara, Turkey last June, where the UV index hit 10 and 11. Even in a shaded outdoor patio of an America-themed restaurant (of all places), the hateful rays of sun bounced off every nearby surface and burnt my lips, what with me having forgotten to apply SPF chapstick. Another hour out there and I would have turned into a pile of ash, for god’s sake.

THAT BEING SAID

Even I, The Count Dracula of Schöneberg, The Pale Prince in the High Tower, The One Who Hides the Sun . . .

. . . do not dread the Berlin sun of springtime. On the first warm and sunny day here, you will see Germans, most of them elderly, sitting on park benches and outside coffeeshops, smiling and letting the sun shine upon their faces. I have witnessed this several years in a row now, and I’ll think: “. . . Wow!” Within days, hey presto, the city-wide phenomenon of peace and brotherly love unfurls itself in the hearts of all who live here. Even the gloomiest gasoline-guzzling Russian is humbled by the restorative powers of the sun. On any given spring or summer day, even in the middle of a weekday, every cafe and park and green space is populated by weed-smokin, radler-drinkin Berliners, and I among them. And I got to say: I love it . . .

Only a few weeks ago, from atop my balcony in the high tower in which I dwell, I saw the glistening snow lit by pale moonlight:

Days ago, as the sun set at six pm, I glanced outside my window and saw what looked to me like a Southern California sunset crisscrossed with chemtrails:

As I observed all my Berlin friends post essentially the exact same picture, I discovered we had instantly become a parodies of ourselves:

SUCH IS MY TALE

Tomorrow I will wake up early and pop open the tops of my windows and balcony door, as you can with all windows in Europe (and Turkey and places beyond). I will make coffee and a smoothie, the same smoothie I make every single day of my life:

From bottom to top:

• frozen mangoes
• frozen blueberries
• frozen strawberries
• spinach
• blackberries
• raspberries
• vegan yogurt
• strawberries
• one banana
• oat milk

. . . and head to the nearest Bürgeramt to register my apartment, provided my quiet desperation will afford me a same-day appointment. Otherwise I am still weeks away from the only appointment I was able to nab all the way back in January. In Germany you have to do this annoying thing called anmeldung where you beg your landlord to sign a piece of paper saying you live where you live, and then take it to this miserable office that is the definition of senseless German bureaucracy, and they ask you some questions and look at your passport, and on and on, and then they stamp a piece of paper that now effectively recognizes you as a human being whereas before you were a non-entity, as least as far as the law is concerned . . .

Otherwise I would not be waking up so early. I would rather die. Thing is, I just quit my old job and now I have a week of beautiful nothing ahead of me before I fly to Vienna for three days to meet everyone at my new job . . . so when I come home tomorrow, almost certainly dispirited from the Bürgeramt, I can go back to sleep till noon with the spotless mind of a little angel. Among other things, one of my goals during my week off is to finally watch UNTIL THE END OF THE WORLD in one sitting. When I visited my friend Kelsey in Detroit in November, it was playing on the TV at the bar we went to, and I thought: “Man I gotta finally watch that . . .” This thing is nearly five hours long, don’t you know, so it is an Everest in the same way ANDREI RUBLEV is.

I will absolutely chill with a movie that long. When I watched the director’s cut of KINGDOM OF HEAVEN, I wished it would go on for another three hours. I want the six-hour cut. But I refuse to break up a movie of any length, especially long ones. I power through a movie and I never do it piecemeal, which is the road taken by cowards. I feel that treating a movie as though it were a season of TV is a kind of sin. It took me a few years to get around to ANDREI RUBLEV because my friend Emma had said the same to me, and so we decided to walk into the abyss together, hand-in-hand Thelma and Louise style, and gladly have our minds ripped open by it. We turned our phones off and everything, and did not speak a single word to one another until the end. And that’s only a little over three hours, or three hours and 20 minutes if you watch the first cut. UNTIL THE END OF THE WORLD, on the other hand, is a whopping four hours and 48 minutes. And this time I’m flying solo. Listen: I can’t wait.

UNTIL THEN . . .

The other night I had a dream that I had Dante slung over my shoulder. I was walking on the sidewalk outside my grandma’s house where he and I had spent a majority of the pandemic alone together. I was talking to him and petting his back with my free hand and he was purring loudly in my ear. Just when I went to turn him around and cradle him in my arms like I always did, my alarm went off and I woke up on my couch in my living room in Berlin. I had tears streaming down my face. I wanted to see his face and look into his eyes so badly. I’m crying now just thinking about it.

Today is Dante’s birthday. He would have been 17 years old. I don’t really tell anyone about this, but I still cry for him every single day. I have cried for him hundreds and hundreds of days since he died. What can I say? It is total anguish for me to spend yet another day without him, and to keep crying for him. His enormous absence in my life has made everything else feel completely hollow. I don’t like it!

When I was staying with my friend Helen in Montreal a few months ago, I saw that she had a framed picture of her childhood cat who had died a few years ago. I asked Helen how she had gotten over her death, and she said, “I never really have.”

This is the second year Dante has not been here for his own birthday. Now I am alone and all I can do is remember him and dream of him. It is such a sadness to go it alone without your best friend. What I would give to spend one more day with Dante. I can tell you with certainty that none of this has gotten any easier. It has only gotten worse.

On Wednesday my dad called and told me he was going to have to put his cat down. Miss Kitty had been a stray who started coming around his property 13 or 14 years ago. She was small and had bright blue eyes and no tail. He brought her inside and there she stayed all those years.

My dad said the morning he woke up and knew it had to be done, he wrapped her in a pillowcase as though it were a blanket and held her until the vet got there to put her down. And afterwards he buried her in a little plot in his yard where our other pets are.

Every time I would come visit him, she’d be curled up in her box on his kitchen table. I will miss kissing her head and hearing her little meow.

MY APOLOGIES

. . . I try never to let this much time elapse between posts. It’s like the fella said: I try all things; I achieve what I can. Thing is, I have been lately attempting with some desperation to make my apartment here less a bachelor pad and more of a cozy Hobbit-like place where I can live in peace and prosperity. I am eschewing filthy MINIMALISM for beautiful MAXIMALISM regarding my humble domicile . . . I have books and movies and incense holders scattered around, and a Persian rug between my couch and massive TV, and on and on. Eventually I want overlapping rugs and gloomy paintings . . . all the trappings of a loner shut-in night owl who GAZES WISTFULLY AT THE MOON WHEN THE DARKNESS FINALLY SETS IN. But such a thing must manifest itself naturally. To force it would be like getting thirty tattoos all over your body within the span of a year. It feels too affected at that point. May as well start carrying a Poser Card . . .

For the first few days I was back in Berlin, I felt a sort of despair that I attribute to coming home to a cat-less house, and being reminded that Dante has been gone for a year and a half now, and feeling also the whiplash of traveling to a new city every few days in as much time and suddenly being inert in a city where I intend to keep building upon whatever my life is now. I had wanted to keep going forever so as to outrun that awful feeling I have felt since August 2023, but realistically how long can you keep living like that? And yet now that two weeks have passed, I feel all right again. There is all the difference in the world between briefly occupying the homes of all my friends goodly enough to put me up when I was passing through, and having my own place again where I can take baths with the bathroom door open, and sleep till noon without inconveniencing anyone, and watch movies on my own TV while sitting on my own couch.

SPEAKING OF WHICH

. . . today is the second day of March, and according to Letterboxd I have so far watched 66 movies since January 1st. And tonight it will be 67. I’ve been watching a movie every night, sometimes two. Listen: it is a source of peace for me. OK? And multiple people have sent me this, implying it is me:

Thought I: That’s the guy from that movie PERFECT DAYS. Why have I not watched it yet? A Wim Wenders joint! I had seen plenty of screen caps from it, many of which I identified with personally, but namely these:

And so saying, I woke up at noon today and made coffee and my gay little smoothie and immediately put it on. It just came across to me as a Daytime Movie, and I suspected it would also be a quiet and relatively plotless Hang Out Movie, which some might also call a Vibes Movie. For once in my life, I was correct on all accounts. Wow!

The film is about a middle-aged man who cleans public restrooms all over Tokyo. He lives an ascetic lifestyle wherein he reads books, listens to cassette tapes, waters his plants, rides his bicycle, eats at the same restaurants every day, visits a public bath house, gets film developed, and on and on. During his lunch breaks, he smiles at strangers and watches how sunlight creates shadows upon nearby surfaces and takes photos of trees with an old camera he always keeps in the pocket of his work jumpsuit. There are a few little dramas threaded in and out of the core meditation of this man’s everyday life, but for the most part you just hang out with him. You know what: I love it. I’m all about hanging out with a cool dude.

Afterwards, not unlike our hero, I felt a strong and ancient impulse to religiously deep-clean my entire apartment.

Earlier in the film, upon seeing this dude’s bedroom, which is just a traditional Japanese bedroom, I was reminded of my own bedroom back in Portland. I was in a real Who Cares Man pit of absolute sadness back then, and I supposed my life was over. I would walk around looking for places where they could bury me when I gave up the ghost before my 30th birthday. My favorite place to hang out was a cemetery, for God’s sake. But inevitably I would wind up back in my room on account of it raining ten months of the year, and though I might think its simplicity is quaint now, I’m here to tell you that it was not a source of happiness in my life. And it must be said here that I am deeply indebted to the saintly women who were goodly enough to sleep with me in Portland, because not a single one of them showed any sign of disgust upon seeing what you might charitably call a utilitarian bedroom, a place where my furniture was made of cinderblocks and wooden boards, and where I literally slept on a Japanese futon on the floor. They say it’s good for your back, and you can always roll it up in the morning and have way more space, such as my Japanese brothers and sisters do. But as a 29-year-old white guy with $12 in his bank account, it was a straight up bummer.

Look upon my bedroom ye mighty and despair:

Not long after that, I saw the light and I heard the word . . . I got a cushy office gig at a publishing company in Oakland, effectively rescuing me from my impending doom. Which is to say I was able hightail it out of that godforsaken city and head back to the East Bay where all my friends were. Now I was being paid the same amount of money every two weeks rather than hemorrhaging money and staring down the barrel of total ruin, as I had been doing for years and made especially worse in Portland. How did the old refrain go again?

There is all the difference in the world between paying and being paid. The act of paying is perhaps the most uncomfortable affliction that the two orchard thieves entailed upon us. But being paid—what will compare with it? The urbane activity with which a man receives money is really marvelous, considering that we so earnestly believe money to be the root of all earthly ills, and that on no account can a monied man enter heaven. Ah! how cheerfully we consign ourselves to perdition!

. . . perdition be damned (lol), now that I was back in Oakland, I instead went about the humble task of furnishing my bedroom with actual furniture and an actual bed, and so on. Soon enough my bedroom resembled vaguely the kind of room inhabited by an adult now three decades deep upon God’s green earth:

My apartment here in Berlin is more or less headed in this direction. OK? I even have the same bed and everything. I need to have all my paintings shipped over from the US, including and especially the self-portrait of world-famous Canadian multimedia artist Laura Rokas . . . but I’ll deal with that next September when I’m back in Virginia for my cousin Jack’s wedding.

You know, perhaps one day I will revert to the relative simplicity of the Tokyo toilet cleaner from PERFECT DAYS . . . But for now I, a younger man, often wrestle with the same thoughts as good ol Squall Leonheart . . .

Truth is, it would be nice to hang out with a g-g-girl. There sure are a lot of them here in Berlin. I recall the words of Cloud’s mom from FINAL FANTASY VII, which I read as a teenager and thought “That sounds nice . . .”

And the other night, as I finally got around to playing the remake from 2020, I made it to the Cloud’s mom flashback scene, and once again I thought “Aw :,)” . . .

Silly goose! I dig the new localization. And man, I need that, except I’m never going to meet an older girl because they’re just not into me for some reason. But it would be nice to find someone sweet. (In the back of my mind, I still have a hope that I will meet a French girl with red hair who is mean to me, but I don’t know how you go about finding one of those those.)

FOR NOW I WILL GAZE BOTH NIGHT AND DAY UPON THE WAR-BROKEN SPIRES OF KAISER WILHELM MEMORIAL CHURCH, THE BEACON OF WEST BERLIN . . .

. . . which can be seen in the opening of WINGS OF DESIRE, when Damiel the angel is perched atop the tallest spire surveying the city below, and only children can see him:

I think of that scene every time I walk past the cathedral, which so ominous and gloomy in its brokenness, just like me. Zoologischer Garten Station is only one stop away from me on the U-bahn, and a 20-minute walk from my apartment, so I see ol Kaiser Wilhelm’s place of worship often. It’s even right outside the flagship Muji store. Wow!

(I am remembering now that Bex and I saw it lit up on some foggy November night when she visited me here from London . . . Sigh!!)

Back in the HERE and NOW, coiled up in the galaxy-glow darkness of my own vampire spire in Schöneberg, I was content to straight up chill all by myself. At that very moment my dad said this:

Hey baby . . . he ain’t wrong.

Later that night, Kenny Powers spoke absolute truth:

And on the nights preceding and following this one, I ate a tangerine-flavored gummy and watched a whole bunch of movies while STONED to the BONE. I’ve been watching a lot of good stuff recently. See here:

(MARRIAGE ITALIAN STYLE, FIRST REFORMED, PICKPOCKET~)

FINALLY, REGARDING MONTY

The other day my friend Lucy posted an Instagram story that was a picture of some little fabric painting (what the hell do you call that?) depicting a smiling clown in a boat beneath a quarter moon. I immediately requested she gift it to dear Monty, who is something of a contented clown herself:

Monty and I, both stoned off our asses, meditated upon the mystery of clown’s journey . . .

An hour or so later, I received good news from the Western front: My negotiations had paid off. Lucy was going to give the clown painting to Monty.

Upon informing Monty of her newest artistic acquisition, hope for peace and happiness in the world manifested itself in some small way, and we were glad.

And what of the other Monty news? Well: The other night, she sent me a picture of her new copy of PIERRE, which is the novel that killed Herman Melville’s career. He was deemed insane and never again wrote a novel—just short stories and poems.

You’re wondering: How did I respond? With a picture of my own copy of PIERRE of course:

I have never read it. I just happened to bring it back to Germany with me to finally blast through the thing because I love Herman Melville and thus I know this book DEFINITELY rules. From the forward:

We have decided to read the book in tandem and at the same pace. I’m so excited I want to puke. See, you have to place these things for yourself in the future or else you will sink into a despair. Something like deciding which new book you’re going to read next is like placing a present at the feet of your future self. It is a good feeling to have when inertia might otherwise steer you into The Dark World, as for a time it did me. (There is a wisdom that is woe; but there is a woe that is madness . . .)

I shall now conclude this post, this trash heap of total idiotic nonsense, THUSLY: With what the kids might called a MOOD BOARD. Yeah . . . just some ways I’ve been FEELIN lately. Such is my tale. Yeah?

FIN.