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?
