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If you had told me a year ago I would enjoy partaking in a competition sport, I would have called you insane. It would be counter to my pattern of decades, I have always avoided all competition. I have a really bad history with inhabiting my body, and thus of not winning much in sports or competitions in my youth, and people being really awful about it, so I just associated it for decades with embarrassment and pain. I gave up any competitive sports, not that I was ever attracted to any. But, I do like moving. I like dancing, as log as it doesn't have to be from memory and the music is modern and pumping. I don't like running, but I like making my body work, like swimming.

An then jpeace sent me an Oculus Quest for my birthday in May. And I had already done VR once and played Beat Saber, a rhythm game where you have light-sabers to slice up cubes that fly at you to music. I really liked it at the time, and always wanted to do more. Now I play it alone, with nobody watching me so no-one needs to see how uncoordinated I am and how confused I get about left and right or colors. I play it at least three times a week as a warm-up for my home workout, with wrist weights that have gotten heavier and heavier over months, as my proficiency also climbed from level Easy to Normal to Hard. I now have even finished some easy maps at Expert, but barely.

Just as I was getting bored after months of playing this game, and buying some music packs (Linkin Park, Timbaland, Panic! At The Disco), Beat Saber released multi-player arena mode. You make your own little cartoon avatar, and you play against other little cartoon avatars, all in our own lanes in an arena, slicing the cubes that come at us, and whoever is scoring the most points is projected in the space really large over everyone. I always go to the quickplay lobby where I am put in a group—maximum of 5—with other random players, we all choose a song, and there we go. No voice chat, nobody calling you a loser or bragging. The avatars are very cartoon stylized, limited movements, no mouths, cute looking. You can wave at each-other, move your arms for gestures—not fingers—you float in the air without a lower body.

I'm... kinda good.

I regularly come in 1st or second in the Normal-level arena, and all over the place on Hard level (as long as they don't select a Camelia song because those I have not even been able to finish by myself on Hard). And I am totally enjoying the competition. At this public level, it's not just about slicing the blocks, but racking up the points by slicing right in the center with full sword follow-through. It makes you have to really commit to every movement, no matter how fast and varied the blocks come, because somewhere this 24 year old guy in Taipei or 12 year old girl in Melbourne is also totally committing to this and if they can slice the blocks just as good as you, but just a little extra, those extra points they rack up will kill you. Incidentally, you have no idea if they are indeed of any age or gender or location, I just made that up. You get a name and a cute avatar.

I literally pretend I am doing all kinds of cool sword-fighting right next to Cavill as The Witcher, and I have such respect for people who get through some of the beatmaps that I do not mind losing at all because holy shit are they good, and the environment makes us all be nice. We wave, we simulate clapping, I bow to winners. In reverse, sometimes I feel bad when I am on first place right form the start at Normal because the map is a little too easy for me, and I make mistakes deliberately so that I slide back and other people can see themselves be number one.

This is all completely opposite to my previous life. I am not a gamer at all, and certainly not online, because I could never make my fingers move well enough with classical gaming. But now in this VR thing I move my body and I am just so enjoying it.

OK, so we're in lockdown again. Happens left and right on the planet, except in countries that have no problem with everyone wearing masks and do rigorous track, trace, and quarantine of the whole population. We upset the climate, forests are burning left and right, permafrost is melting, nature has to encroach upon our cities, we all live way too close together, and the pathogens are happening, and it will keep happening. First waves, second waves, third waves—we're gonna get really good as a species at making vaccines, remain so-so at distirbuting them globally, but they will never be instantaneous.

And the first couple of months of this first wave of new disease was sudden, scary, unknown, inconvenient, chaotic, painful, boring, lonely, heartbreaking, abusive, etc., etc., etc., etc. And we had to take care of ourselves. Take a break. Send memes around that getting out of bed was enough on some days. Eat chocolate. Eat cheese. Make tweets about how that was necessary because, you know, our old lives were just gone. And it was OK. We had to. It was so sudden, and so scary. God, I recently replayed some of my Insta stories after three weeks in lockdown about how awful I felt not having touched anybody in that time. Now we're, what, 8 months later? Some people have been unable to touch anyone for all that time.

Meanwhile, the disabled community I read on Twitter is just side-eyeing at us ableds crying because we can't leave our homes or can't do our work like we're used to and nobody is attracted to us because we never see anyone. Um, hello, they say—welcome to our lives. For decades. They didn't have a choice but to engage with their normal.

And waves coming and going of this is just gonna keep happening. Or other catastrophes. For decades. We can't keep indulging ourselves anymore because we have to stay home. We have to find ways to stay sane without turning into carb monsters or alcoholics or inert. I am sorry, that short-term shit is just running out. It's about to hit that stage like in drug-addiction where you are not doing the drug but the drug is doing you. The food is doing you. The alcohol is doing you. The not moving, the not cleaning the house, it is about to do you. It is keeping you stuck, creating a cumulative mountain of problem, or problems, you can't get over without major help.

I'm not doing it. These are my constraints now. I accept them. I do not like them, but this is reality, and I am engaging. No gym, so home workouts with bands. Fuck the candy, but I was controlling that already anyway. I am stuck at home this lockdown, so I am making sure I eat right. I am using VR to help my mental health because playing games in whiz bang environments helps me. I know how to call people. I will find ways to get together and make an effort since we are allowed to meet up in certain circumstances. I bought an extra cool monitor for work, I am not waiting for work to rescue me.

The indulging is to numb ourselves, the permissiveness is to let us not have to engage. Yeah too bad. We can't let it go on. Whatever privilege you have, to be able to move to exercise in new ways, to spend money on tele-therapy, use it to deal with the new normal. It's not going to go on.

There's a saying that you should only write when not writing is more painful than writing. Nobody but people who written volumes understand that. Writing can be such a slog but if you have to get it out, you must.

I am the kind of person who always read a lot because he had few friends and little better to do, and then when I started writing, the kind of person who always in High School got high marks for his essays and always had to read them out. Once I got on the Internet in 1988, I came into this habit of never fully processing anything until I had written and posted about it, and I probably should apologize to many people previously on Usenet for that. Then there was the blogging days, and now the Twitter and the Facebook and you get it: I do not shut up. I did stop reading books because I get too much emotionally involved and start behaving badly towards my own health (no movement, no sleep) but I still read a fuckton of social and blogs and online.

But yeah, blogging and tweeting is not writing. And as a romantic and superhero-imprinted and very sexual, but also often very bored as I am, I have been constructing emotional scenes and weird scenarios for decades now. And after having talked for it for years how I wanted to write a Gay BDSM Superhero Romance Porn novel, eight years ago I started. And tore the result up, waited another four years, and then started again in July 2016, went back to that first chapter for a year, and finally in 2018, while I was searching for work and a home in Berlin, got earnest on chapter two. Because you can do writing anywhere in between applying for things and waiting for replies.

And at that point it hurt more not to write than to write. I was isolated, lonely, cold, and there were all these imaginary friends waiting for me to create them and put insanely dramatic words in their mouths in between saving the city. I don't know how to write prose, really. I am fine with the essays I vomit out in the heat of the moment and then post, but I suck at story-telling, expressions, surroundings, action. That's the craft and I never bothered to pick it up. But Inow had to learn because I was on a roll. I ended my first draft three weeks ago.

180.000 or so words. Oh God.

I don't think I will ever let anyone really read it. I don't think anyone should--although one person has read about 60%, and their edits of the first chapter have proven invaluable to steer my thinking about how to communicate. I am moving my first draft chapter by chapter from Medium.com to LivingWriter to do an editing pass, applying to the first chapters what I have learned to do by the eleventh, and I still think this is not interesting for anyone but me. It's a complete Mary-Sue (me) shipping with the main DC heroes, although I tried to make them more interesting.

But I sure had fun doing it. I finally discovered the fun in writing without being read. I don't need this to be read. I just needed a fun hobby. When you crochet a terrible sweater, you don't want to see it in the Louvre. You want to have had fun crocheting. And I loved this process.

We're about ten gay white men between, what mid-thrities and mid-fifties? We're in the beautiful living room of a flat in Berlin, Brits, Dutch, Americans, and we come together every month to craft. I have shown up with little cardboard projects, some mending, but this time one of us showed up with a project to make little pouches for baby animals who lost their habitats in Australian fires. So there we were, in an uncharacteristically warm Berlin winter, under cozy lights, talking about our lives and projects while we cut templates, cut T-shirts, cut shapes out of the T-shirts to assemble later. The costume designers and creative directors teach me how to use enormous shears. We sit at a dinner table and talk while we craft.

We talk about another continent that's on fire. Literally the other side of the world. We repeat to each-other the news items we read. How big wombats are. Half a billion animals dead. How much has burned. Smoke in Chile. Is relief coming. It's a terrible disaster, more is coming in the next few months. A continent, according to what we read, is fucking burning.

Disasters end. Australia is a developed country. Governments take out loans to rebuild, thus having their children pay the bill for this disaster, but Australia can probably get that credit at great rates as long as it keeps exporting the hydrocarbons that made these fires so much more awful than other years. But then I hear myself ask: "What if this happens next year again? And again? Does a whole continent turn into dry grass land? Do the cities burn?" It's already losing the Great Barrier Reef, a major ecology. Every year on this planet is hotter. The cities far away from the fires have zero visibility from the smoke. Now picture this every year for the next five years until there is no nature left to burn.

We joke about 20 million people getting on boats to Indonesia and the nation denying them. We cut more fabric that will make sleeping pouches for micro bats. We talk about other things.

We're in northern Europe. The worst that will happen here are 40-degree days on end in summer in the coming years. And a ton of refugees this country will tear itself apart over, probably letting fascism gain more ground. But for now, this is us, getting together on craft nights, powerless, as the climate tipping-points happen that make the fires humans start burn out of control across continents.

"It's time for me to go home now," I said to Ceven as I was walking out into the street, "unless you have something for me to read..."

He knew exactly what I meant, got all excited and gestured me to go back into Ludwig, the bar he and Maurus had started three and a half years ago in Kreuzberg, Berlin. I was now attending their final, closing night. They had poured heart and soul and finances into Ludwig, making it an absolute Queer haven for every expression of gender and sexuality, especially the more marginalized ones, with events, readings, drag nights, cabarets.

Twice I had stood naked on stage there reading some piece as part of a Naked Boys Reading event, where a handful or slightly more of men each get on stage and read a text while being totally naked. The first time was when Russel, an artist I had met online as a friend of a London friend, was exhibiting his work at Ludwig and NBR was part of the vernissage. I had seen the call for readers come by on Facebook and I, a total stranger to them, just signed up, and showed up, and read a piece on psychadelica written in the sixties. We were on the little stage in the front bar, with the curtains to the street very firmly closed and strong directions to the audience not to photograph.
The second time was in the werkraum in the back. The theme had been 'Desire' and I had wanted to read about food, because that is what I actually desire in Berlin--the sex part is already so totally covered for us gays. Harriett found me a text about whipping egg-whites by Julia Child, which ended up being perfect.
The third time had been the week before, but not in Ludwig, when Ceven had been asked to do an NBR for the Berlin part of the re-launch of Drummer magazine, a seminal BDSM magazine for men that had ceased to publish in the nineties. We read in the middle-room of New Action, the gay fetish bar with the strictest leather code in Berlin, and by now I was pretty secure being seen reading things naked. In fact, the Drummer event was where I actually did some minor character work for the first time ever to the dialog in my piece.

But Ludwig was over now. That part of Kreuzberg has little Queer foot-traffic, and people with marginalized identities don't have a ton of money to spend on travel and drinks anyway. The night had already been super special--I had arrived in time for many performances, like the drag sax & tuba group that walked on stage to ABBA's ARRIVAL album deep cut and then did a valiant rendition of Dancing Queen on these instruments, a bravura drag performance of BE OUR GUEST rewritten in German to say BEING YOUR GUEST describing the nights of Ludwig, a heartfelt version of SEND IN THE CLOWNS, speeches, poetry, and Ceven flawlessly directing it in sheer chaos. How he was standing so perfectly on the closing night of his project I will never know, but there he was, Maurus and the bar staff keeping the alcohol flowing as they announced what they were running out of.

I have to admit I felt a little lost. I wanted to contribute but knew no one, really, and I had not been a good patron myself. I applauded, I cheered, I had tea, and then I considered and ran the idea of reading past Hagen behind the bar. Just as the performances were ending, I felt so useless I had to go, and on the way out past the packed bar and to all the people spilling over outside, I made my quip... and was dragged back in. Ceven announced to the bar another act was coming, then went on to frantically search for a book in the back room, and handed it to me as I had followed. Katzen Astrologie. "Ceven, this is in German. I'm not good enough yet." He almost started talking courage into me, but decided on something else. He went back to the front bar and I undressed in the werkraum in the back, slipped back into my big leather boots, and tied my big shawl around my genitals. He hands me his phone where he has pulled up a text. Oh yeah, I can do that one.

I stand in the back, almost naked, the patrons closest to me looking at me wondering what is up, while Ceven is back behind the mic on the small stage, announcing how he is going to do something very naughty tonight (curtains staying open) and then loudly making the loveliest introduction of how I had done NBR and been one of his favorite readers and how wonderful it was that we were doing one last impromptu performance RIGHT NOW on Ludwig's last night to make it all complete.

I walk through the crowd and step on stage, knowing I look like a big, super-hairy beast with half a shaved head and a smart-ass smirk on his face. I do a little intro, I take the shawl off to be totally nude (nothing obscene, I am a grower and totally not aroused), I make a point of turning around to mention "oh my god, the guys outside are looking at my ass now, aren't they?" (they were, but honestly they should, my ass is amazing these days), a little back and forth with Ceven about what we did and then how he has to unlock the phone with his face, and then launch into my reading of a timeless, towering, well-known, well-loved, American classic poem. GREEN EGGS AND HAM by Dr. Seuss.

I mention how I have not read this in, well, 42 years. Fortunately the lettering is big, my voice is steady, every time I look up some members of the audience are giving me lots of energy, and the piece is of course expertly built up to be read out loud. I was unrehearsed so I ust went for every innuendo that I could find in the repeated questions and for angry, hysterical speed-up during the answers. I bulldozered through it. I thundered through it. I never faltered.

The applause was awesome. I absolutely love that I did it, spontaneously. Ceven gave me the biggest hugs. It's the kind of moment you move to Berlin for.

It's a very warm summer night here in Berlin. Work organized a BBQ for a visiting C-suite person. I was sitting next to someone I had just met, and we connected very quickly. She is telling me about the emotional work she is doing, EMDR, a variation of it, that it is going well, what she is learning, "...have you done any trauma work?"
--"Oh, I don't have trauma," I hear myself say.

I have been thinking about that since I have said it. I haven't had trauma as an adult, really. I had intense situations, I got in some really difficult situations at work, long term emotionally abusive situations like capitalism sets up for us at work, but I would not call them traumatic. It took time to get over them, but they didn't create lasting effects. I avoided the biggest trauma of men in my generation by being ensconced among straight students in Amsterdam and having only safe sex.

But as a child... I can't remember how I got bullied anymore. I know it happened, I remember so much of my youth as being in tears. But not the incidents. It's over 40 years ago, these memories have just eroded. I can't access them any more than I can access daily life at the time in other ways.

I spoke to the same person from the BBQ later, and I said that I have had traumatic experiences, but nothing that rose to clinical levels.

And it just amazes me--I meet so people, so many people, where it doesn't take me long to find out they still carry open wounds in some form, especially the LGBTQs. How come I don't? Am I deluding myself? But I take inventory and I seem to fine. I sleep so well. No intrusive thoughts. I work, I am productive. I don't seem to suffer low self-esteem.

But. But. How did I avoid all this?

And yet, a friend wanted to ask me something about something that caught his eye in a Netflix series, so I told him I'd watch him. I watched two episodes, and oh boy it is not good, it is such a vanity project--but the first episode opens with depicting a bully, of course cast too old, so also hot, but exuding that dangerous energy of the broken lashing out. And I realized I sat there with an elevated heartbeat for the whole hour.

Birthday again, and two weeks before I could not longer stand this cold spring we are having in Berlin (I live in Berlin now OMG, it has been a year) and booked myself to a place that has guaranteed warm sun, a gay beach, and very gay nightlife--which is also, um, ~~trashy~~economical as fuck: Gran Canaria. I always used to stay in Maspalomas, which is on the dunes, and is the very gay area. It therefore also charges the gay tax: everything is either standard-price but shit, or €€€€ for Marriott-level normalcy that gets passed-off as five-star luxury. I was done with that and still, the backrooms and surf called, you know?
So I booked 5 days, but in the straight town, Meloneras, which is on the other side of the dunes. Turns out to be a lovely area, pretty upscale, with some lovely and some luxury hotels, mostly from the same group. There's a gym for the hotels which is one of the best I ever worked out at ever for its size, and they booked it right to my room remotely. I was full board so I had nothing to think about, and at night I just took a €7 taxi to the shopping center that turns into a huge gay party area at night. Which I did.

What was interesting was that one little piece of anxiety was gone. I was lying on my sunbed on the gay beach (a slightly shorter walk through the dunes than from Maspalomas) seeing everyone talk to each other. They had met last night, or knew each other from various gay scenes in our major capitals. They were all in groups, nobody seemed lonely. That always gives me anxiety, I always feel everyone sees me come alone, not talk to anyone, and have no friends, which means I must be awful--and this is my own thinking, may or may not be connected to the truth.

But this trip, I was like, OK, so I am Johnny No-mates. This is how I go through life: I am never part of a scene, I take a long time to fall into a group, and it's always a complete surprise which group I end up with (A straight student society? Poly-bi's in Boston? A cul-de-sac in Santa Monica and one old friend and his exes? Straight-kink-party-kids and a clan of interconnected beardy emo-boys? What the...) This is just me. And what if I made some friends this trip? I did that once in Fort Lauderdale, where I made some weekend friends, or one year here on the beach--and a day after I leave it makes no difference. So what if these people see me as a loner prowling sex-fiend? I am! No wait--but kind of, and I look hot doing it. I was getting a ton of stares at the Centro Commercial Yumbo.

So yeah, great holiday, and I got over my own head-fear of how I get seen. I am a lone wolf. Always have been. Don't always want to be--I'd love a posse, I loved being in one in the few times I was, like when I went out with the Somerville Skinhead Triad here in Berlin a couple of times or a few times with the beardy boys in London. But this is it. I am 49, and there we go.

Also, here's my pic, 49. Not as good as a pro photoshoot with

bitterlawngnome but god I love that gym.

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#pumped #indulging #fitness #results #vacation #itWasntEvenArmsDay #greatLighting #itsNotTooBig #itsNotTooVeiny #ILikeItSoShutUp #titangymmeloneras

A post shared by F J van Wingerde (@fjvwing) on May 13, 2019 at 3:48pm PDT

So B. in MA sends me mail that I need to meet A, a Desi gay otter technologist who lives in NYC when he comes to Berlin. We hang together for two of his trips: same gay sex clubs, dinners, other clubs, and then on a next trip says, we are having dinner with my friend M and her friends, and I am like, how come you have more friends here than I do?
But we end up at dinner by M with C as well and then we dress up in semi-fetish sexy clothing go out to the KitKat club and have shenanigans with standing in line and being rejected and going to another club and then trying again and having one of the co-owners now supervise entry allow M & C in as a couple and then next look at A and I with a look of why aren't you already in there? and waving us through in disgust for being so late. We dance in between the half-naked very mixed mostly-straight crowd and I now have a new set of anecdotes--and M at the end of the night says, we need more of this.

So A is back in NYC, and C, a software engineer in his late twenties who already has had one big exit and lives in Berlin in a fab remodeled apartment, is on a five-week trip, but M invites me for further dinner parties. We all sit in her kitchen in a flat of a nineteenth-century apartment building, made of brick and stone, and 2.5m tall ceilings and weird corners. She invites her friends, who she has met through residencies at programming retreats in Brooklyn that sound like a cult, friends of friends, that kind of thing. All ex-pats, mostly American, we speak English. She servers vegetarian food, I always bring meatballs for the meat-eaters, and chocolate mousse I kept screwing up until the third time that it was perfect but she had invited 16 people so we all just got a few spoonfuls of heaven--God it was good.

We hang around the table, they drink all kinds of wine, and I am always the oldest. They all work in blockchain and universal basic income societies and big data security and things like that. We talk about capitalism playing itself by letting Brexit happen, and what a good hook-up is like, and witnessing Charlottesville and getting residency permits.

I soak it in. Around midnight we break up, and we all go home or to clubs or a bar around the corner here in Kreuzberg where one of us saw live music being set up. It's the kind of night you move to Berlin for.

Fell into a Dr. Phil hole on YouTube over the weekend. While still fundamentally exploitative of his guests by displaying their anguish, I have to say it feels more ethical than my other bad TV addiction, Jeremy Kyle. At least McGraw is qualified to tear people open.

But it is quite striking how he will tell the parents of some insanely unruly teenager that they have failed, hold them reasonably accountable for their failures, yet always sends the teenager away to muck out stables of shit at a 'therapy' farm in Montana so the owner can live out her teenage horsey girl dreams with heavily subsidized under-age labor.

Oh hey thanks Mom and/or Dad for signing my guardianship over to some actually complete strangers to take me god knows where. That is so going to normalize our relationship.

In 2016, one of the many themes IKEA launched for the year was about being a nomad: how IKEA could support someone who moved a lot. They dressed it up as being for someone who sought novelty and wanted to explore many different things, but it was obviously actually for people with low economic security, and thus their least aspirational capsule collections ever.

"" (Watch on YouTube)

It got panned as being depressing, who would want to live like this, IKEA making some weird misstep. But IKEA actually does a lot of continuing research, and everyone who has being paying attention to the middle classes in the West could see this would be useful for themselves or someone they knew-- and was already living like this but without the bins being the right size for clothes and easy to use or stack.IKEA did not become big by not knowing exactly what to sell for the times.

So I am struck by the 2019 catalog that came out in the last few weeks. I religiously study these catalogs every year--I am a frustrated interior designer with a love for small spaces and This Is My Bible--and this absolutely the darkest and quietest catalog I have ever seen.

Dark wall colors reign, over and over: pewter, blue-black, brown-black. This catalog introduced what they call Signal Red (traffic-sign red, basically) as a wall and furniture color in the 80s, now the loudest red walls are cerise or dusty pink. The white is a cream, the featured yellow wall is not just a color between ecru and muted mustard, they then decorate it with a big black flat screen TV and empty black picture frames to echo the shape of the TV and make it look less out of place. The 'light' colors are aqua, soft pink, dove gray, but so expertly chosen you don't realize you are basically looking at the color scheme of a pediatric hospital after the best stylists in the world got a hold of it.

Much of it is luxe and glamorous but there is no joie de vivre. The segment about the 'busy' house doesn't even comes close to the visual noise the previous IKEA catalogs used to be for the standard living rooms which they would strew with toys, vases, and Marimeko-like busy textiles on every surface: no, the objects on display here are all color-adjacent, curated, muted. The segment with the "light-flooded" kitchen filters it to be the softest direct sunlight ever, like it is coming from over clouds. All the other daylight shots in the catalog look like they were lit wit the soft ominous light of an afternoon when the clouds have gathered just before a storm, or the fuzzy glare of the sun as a halogen bulb.

Why? What is this catalog telling us? I read the editorial and it is all about the home as a haven from the outside world, a shelter to come to, instead of their usual tone of the home as a place to prepare you to launch you out. There is no outdoor party segment, not even a cramped-quarter Dinner Party In Your Studio like in 2018; the busiest segment features young people in a loft hanging out that devotes half a page to how the right blinds can hold ALL light back. The coziest segment in the loveliest palette with clever uses of curtains as partitions is actually about how to share living in one single room with your child: IKEA tackles re-settling refugee living.

(Tip: use the couch to delineate the room, and put all your child's stuff and their play space behind it.)

Again, nothing goes into that catalog unless it has been researched of being reflective of the moods and needs of the global population. While they renew their in-store displays and digital media continually, that catalog is a yearly one-shot and those themes are obviously considered hard. And what the world is telling itseld through that catalog is brace yourselves, find a shelter, get used to living with a lot less, and not liking the outside.

If you want to exercise your braodband you can see the whole set of promo shots here, but note than on screen they are brighter than they actually look in the catalog.

So I worte on an entry about liking the sidwalk culture of Berlin, sitting down, eating, drinking, slowing down. What was noticeable in that culture, after having lived in LA and central London, was the lack of homeless people asking for money during my sidewalk moments. Wherever I sit outside, in Mitte, Kreuzberg, PLB, nothing. I thought there were fewer or something. I was wrong.

I now live in Neukölln, and I believe pretty south, close to the S-Bahn ring. I take the S-Bahn every day to work and back. It is currently a little stuffy, but it is never crowded like London public transport is, and most times I can even get a seat. It is there and the U-Bahn where the panhandling happens, and often. And the stations between home and work, which include Sonnenallee and Hermanplatz, always have many people in and around it who are indigent if not homeless, sitting around, drinking on a bench together listlessly while always one of them talks in a wailing manner about something, sometimes lying on the station floor out cold on something.

They can be young, young adults, and always obviously tripping on substance abuse, almost never looking like healthy cheeky drop-outs who might be vagabonding.And then older, who have been doing this for too long, weathered, abused. And white. In a city that's about 20% from a POC background, with Arab and Turkish backgrounds being 9% alone.

They are all out now, in this hot summer, which nobody looks good in--Berlin does not do airco, they consider recycled air unhealthy. But yeah, around my stations, the look is not good. Not good at all. Security cleans up the big stations like Südkreuz, but the small ones... This one dude keeps being out cold, lying flat on the floor, every time I arrive to walk home. Sometimes he is awake, seated, and panhandles. Once I saw EMTs around him, checking his pulse. He was back the next day, equally out cold. Maybe I live in some nexus of it, but I just notice a lot of it.

Researching a new city and getting a job there first, for months, living in cheap places

Watching DIY on YouTube over and over so I could install my own sink and faucet and cabinets and other things, as people on my Instagram stories can see from time to time

A soda stream so I do not have to lug soda bottles up to the 4th (5th US) floor, or always have to plan to take the empty bottles back to the supermarket for the deposit back--when the deposit machines recognize the bottles.. And I do like my diet soda after dinner. And a floor in this pre-war building is 10 feet tall. Although I miss being judgy when I see what bottles and how many people in line before for the machine bring back.

Using the perk at my job to buy a yearly transport pass so I go to lakesides on sunny Sundays when you can't do anything in this country anyway because, seriously, only some gyms and restaurants are open and everything is dead

Black-out curtains in my bedroom. That yes, I hung myself. I sleep like a log

Making a breakfast in advance on Sunday that I totally love and I look forward to the night before and I get all this extra time in the morning

I am very happy, very relaxed, and I look pretty awesome. I am terrified about the future, but right now is OK.

...and I will ignore you. I truly think the time for civility is over. We tried to incorporate all viewpoints in the marketplace of ideas and yet suddenly the US is looking at concentration camps for children and Italy wants to expel Roma street by street. I have been told it is the official position of the association of genocide scholars to not engage with holocaust denial because there is nothing to be gained by taking it on, there is no exchange of ideas to be had by those who deny reality. I have the same position, and have had it for 5 years, that the same is true for people who can not be convinced you should care for other people, even if they are not like you, like people who might get sick, or trans people, or brown children. For years now I have refused to even entertain a discussion about GLBT equal rights or racism or whatever; I was already done. Now I am seeing a lot for people being DONE too, and reaching for firm action to stave off those that would use the discourse promoted by liberalism and enlightenment to undermine it into fascism. DONE.

My living room is taking shape. The whole flat is, actually. Almost everything is unpacked. Some major furniture left to buy. Doing a whole kitchen cheap is a trip. I am busy with the short term. The job, which is fine. The flat. Learning Berlin. My short commute. The dreary wethaer right now. When to go to what supermarket.

My thoughts long term are in a new place. I am fundamentally scared about the world. The moral center is gone. Everything is sliding to fascism. There is no bright beacon right now. And climate change is now out of control and not going to stop. I also didn't do anything about my retirement while in London so my future is very undercapitalized. I used to think we would only advance into a better world and beyond by being engaged. Now I am thinking that since the problems are so structural, retreating from society and using the last resources you have to live out your life on a beach and not give a fuck is a rational response.

To get paid in Germany you need a tax number.

To get a tax number you have to register with City Hall* in your city.

To do that registration, City Hall wants proof you live in the area. In Berlin the latest rule is that you have to show up with a form signed by the home owner or representative**. The city knows who owns dwellings, BTW, so sublets will only do if the hone-owner signs.

To rent a home, you have to convince landlords you will be a good tenant, because protections are fierce here for tenants. Home-ownership is not as much a mark of middle-class success as it is in the USA or UK or NL, especially in large cities. Landlords have to announce in the contract how they will raise the rent during the tenancy, like 5% each year or inflation-indexed. Landlords try to set a limit to contracts like a decade since contracts are not renewed (or not) at the end of the year. Decades of tenancy are not exceptions to the point that it is normal here for a rental to not have kitchen-furniture or appliances and for tenants to bring their own, and for the tenant to remodel the bathroom.
Required documentation: a credit check, proof of having no previous rental debt, last three paychecks, copy of passport.

To get a credit check you really need a German bank account.***

To get a German bank account you generally need to be registered or at the very least have a regular address with your name on the mailbox*****. Can not be a PO box, and to open a PO box Deutsche Post wants proof you live in Germany anyway in which case you do not need etc.
There is one exception, and all expat blogs share it: N26, a newer, totally online bank. They are the only bank whose address form has a line that allows a user to enter a "care of" ("bei") addition to an address. N26 knows solving this problem is where a market is for them.

And this whole story is why I stayed in AirBnBs for 5 months looking for a job and did not think of housing until I had the job, because it was very unlikely I could scale these hurdles for decent apartments without the documentation. I could have tried for the roommates circuit, which is enormous here, but that would still just give me housing and not the tax number. Instead, I attacked the paperwork issue one item at a time:

My break-out of the maddening bank/credit cycle was to ask a local friend if I could open an N26 account at their address. So I had a bank account, so I could do a credit check.
Once I had the job and signed the contract, I asked my employer if I could get a proof of employment for rental purposes instead of having to copy my contract. The HR person knew exactly what I needed and typed it up. Key concepts: permanent, of unlimited length, and yearly salary. This would have to do as my proof of salary, even though it was not the required 3 months of payslips.
Copy of my passport.
Written reference from my UK landlord which I had a friend, who translates for a living, translate to German.

Uploaded the whole bundle to the rentals website, it has slots on the profile for it, so that when you see rentals you like, you can send the whole bundle with your approach email. If the rental agent likes what they see, they may ask you to come by to the a viewing, and it is always a group thing. In fact, on most ads, they just announce the time for the viewing and ask you not to contact prior but to bring your bundle of papers including a filled-in copy of an application form they attact to the listing on the web.

It's all very New York, or San Francisco, and fortunately I had a week's time for this hunt before work started, after the craziness that is Berlin Gay Party Easter here and visiting my family as well.
One friend said the average hunt takes 6 weeks. I can not just stay in AirBnBs and not register, as my employer can legally only pay me for three months without a real tax number, so this had to happen. Hunting for a home while in a new job sucks; I had to get good at it in just one week so that the rest could go with less effort. I did hear of someone getting the form for registration signed by the AirBnB host, but again, exception.

On advice of my friends I added to my bundle print-outs of my bank accounts to show solvency*****. Legally, you can't throw money like I did when I landed in the UK by offering to pay 6 months in advance, plus, as said, 6 months is nothing in a tenancy here.

I go to my first viewing and count, I shit you not, 100 to 150 people there to view. I start talking to this woman with a dog, she is on viewing number 40. I freak. She also tells me what forms I am missing, and I get more tips. Her dog is awesome, he's meeting all these new people! I see her bundle has a cover letter introducing her and her partner and her dog. I see other bundles, they are thick and well-documented. I stand in a line that goes down two floors of staircases and snakes through the apartment back to the realtor who is taking bundles. Young, bright people let go of the forms they are clutching, neatly bound, faces full of anxious hope that their curated documentation of their lives will do the trick to get this reasonably-priced apartment. I'm overwhelmed by the amount of people still on the staircase when I decide to leave.

Yet I hang around a little on that staircase, and listen to the realtor. Someone must have asked her if they stood a chance because she is saying "Oh when I go through these stacks half of them will not have the required documents". I observe her hands, what she is doing with what people hand her, listen to her tone of voice, where her eyes go, what she is looking for. I use my skills as a UX designer to step into her world and thought process. The realtor always removes the binding or the folder from stacks handed to her, and hands it back, just keeping the papers.She scans every stack for specific items. I then realize the cover letters and pictures of dogs just get in the way of her work; she doesn't care, she won't remember you better for them. She wants proof you can afford this and are reliable, as expressed in the German documents, and that is it. (Researching realtors some more later I will overhear how they do not make decisions, the landlord does, the realtors just filter and I bet the filter all fluff out.) I go home, worried but determined to get my documents in better shape. No fluff, though. Facts.

My translator / teacher friend, themselves immigrant from the US, reminds me that I work for a very solid employer (scientific publishing) and indeed make enough to hit the target of at net least 3 times the rent--yes, many landlords insist the household will not spend more than the guideline of 30% on housing costs--and my passport shows I am from a country considered solid, if not also that I am a white male. I have a lot of privilege here over all the immigrants I hear in line, all coming to Berlin for better, slower, sexier, more interesting lives that they cobble together with gigs here and small jobs there--but that won't make landlords think highly of them as they face having them for the next ten years and evictions being a pain and renters depressing the value of the home during a sale. Me, I write down "Web Designer" and a salary, and on advice, include printouts of my bank accounts to prove the solvency my lack of three German payslips so far leaves open.

I make a Google Drive spreadsheet of which ads I have written to, which answer back, when the viewing times are, and then notes about the viewing afterwards. I use Google Drive so I can update on the go on my phone after a every viewing. I notice that the listing gets taken down very fast, sometimes even before the viewing, as realtors feel secure enough people will show anyway from just advertising briefly. My query on the site is active to send me push notifications of every new entry, at least 5 a day, and my 4 months previously living in various parts of Berlin truly helps making quick decisions.

I find the copy shop in my neighborhood and bring my USB stick with my forms to print out, especially the application forms I filled in and signed in Preview on my Mac so they don't have to decipher my handwriting. The copy shop feels like something from the 90s, old copiers, two Windows 10 boxes attached to printers, a few cents per page gets charged afterwards at the counter where I can also buy little plastic translucent folders to put my facts-only bundles in, and then into my bag they go, ready to hand out. At every viewing I now try to be in first, exchange some words with the agent, hand over my documents in their folder with the application visible through on top. In between viewings I scope neighborhoods for the next viewing, and think of all the times before that I did this: trying to find a room in Amsterdam by going to all these agencies and student groups, so many of them useless, reading ads in the Boston newspaper and just calling an agent for something that seemed good which is why I ended up in Park Drive on the first outing, the viewings with an actual realtor that did actual work for us once we decided to become homeowners, Disney arranging a coordinator for me that made multiple realtors with appointments and being driven around happen in LA, every step easier and more taken care of. And then when I chucked the career in the US to start over in the UK, it's back to being alone and scrambling, dealing with the smooth-talking assholes in the UK showing me decrepit flats at outrageous prices; the one I ended up over time turned out be a bargain ten years later for barely raising the rent, such that I was the next-to-last of my friends to still live in central London. And now here I was doing cattle calls and nervously hanging out in front of a building, sizing up how many other people are showing up, making bundles of forms like nothing changed in thirty years instead.

It's a warm week and many are in different parts of town, and most are 4 or 5-floor walk-ups. I get very tired. I dream about decorating some of the quirky apartments I see, I try to stop myself because I will know I will be so disappointed when I do not get them.

And yet still, I would not say Berlin is in a housing crisis, though it thinks it is. I say that because while far more people want flats than are available, in the ten viewings I went to in that first week of homes in decent locations for high but not ridiculous prices, 8 were good stock. Like, truly respectable, will be warm in winter, good floors, even and painted walls, new bathrooms. But always so many people waiting... I changed my profile that gets sent on first contact to emphasize I was single, I was 47 and responsible, I had no pets nor musical instruments.

But Monday rolled around and work had to start so no more daytime viewings or much browsing and prep for me. I had to work now. I had a viewing moved to 9, another to 6 PM. As scared as I was that this might never happen, it was all I knew how to do, as I was also mapping out what next steps I could take every week to raise my profile or find other avenues. Fortunately I had no demands for my first rental which, after ten years in a tiny flat in London, could not be met by a solid Berlin apartment with wooden or laminate floors.

And then Tuesday I get this call: it's an agent for one of the apartments . Am I still interested? My German version of Hell Yes! makes her almost giggle, I can tell. They need first month, deposits, fees, and it sounds like they won't take my bank cards. I raid an ATM for cash with my N26 and Revolut cards: in a country that so mistrusts credit that many restaurants can not handle card payments, the cash machines have absurdly high limits. I go to the agency at the appointed time. I sign. I count out cash, dozen and change of 50 euro bills--and I now legally will get to live in an apartment, 5th floor walk-up, in a cute neighborhood (Rixdorf) for at least a year, for which I will have to furnish a kitchen, starting May 2nd. Yeah I won't be able to turn that move around in a day, so I extend my current AirBnB so I will overlap a whole month. Yes, my search only took a week and a half, but that I got it was sheer luck: the agent told me she called me when the previous person in her stack had not picked up. Luck of the draw means this could have taken forever.

So: two main anxieties gone. I relax. Work is nice, I like my assignments, lovely starts. I now have housing. I can schedule a registration, get a tax number. I can do this. The whole week has been warm, dry, sunny Spring weather. The whole continent, but especially this city and I, are coming out of a cold gray winter. My current neighborhood in Kreuzberg is delightful with its wide sidewalks that restaurants put their tables and chairs on in the evening; everyone eats outside. Many quirky places too, one stupidly overpriced coffee-shop I want to deride for being staffed only by English-native hipsters but alas, like Yelp said, their cheesecake really is the best ever. Public transport gets me to work and back in 40 minutes, and I always get seats and nobody is pressed in my armpit like on the London Northern Line. Work is moving buildings now, and from my new place it will be even quicker and the building is next to a gym in my chain, and an IKEA.

I need more friends, and I have a ton of work to do still to get my furniture and new appliances up those 5 flights of stairs, and close out the London apartment, but for now I am actually really content.

*Close enough.
**Wohnunggeberbestätigung, I kid you not. "House giver confirmation".
*** The Credit Reporting company says that if you do not have a German bank account, you should call, so maybe something can be done for foreigners there.
**** With the ways dwellings are structured here, you can not specify an apartment like "second floor" or "#45"; your name has to be on the mailbox and doorbell or the post will not deliver.
*****Friends have told me they met private landlords who would take just the bank prints as proof, even without a work contract, that my friends would be good tenants, and got housing that way. I have no personal experience with that.

A huge fucking mistake parents of multiple children make is telling the older child to get the younger child to do something (not walk away in the park, fetch something from the room, come back to the group) and assuming the older child knows appropriate boundaries and actually has control over the younger child. Because I am sure it goes great most of the time, but sometimes the younger child just doesn't want to go along and then the older child feels responsible and has no tools but to use the violence of being older and bigger, and then what should have been a nice afternoon in the park becomes totally distressing to me as I see a young child being dragged, screaming hysterically and dragging behind in total tears, trying not to kick or punch so as to not elicit worse violence, as an older child does not know what to do but pull and drag and twist arms to make happen what their parent told them to so they can be a good child.

Screaming. Hysterically. Crying. In a stupidly full park. And nobody says or does or even notice these two children locked in a horrible moment.

I actually went up and from 20 feet away just looked at the older child. She was also upset having been put in this awful position, but just said to me the younger one was running away. And I said, in terrible German, don't beat her, this is not your responsibility, go get your parents. But I had to walk away because a big white man should not be seen talking to two young Turkish girls even though THE WHOLE FUCKING PARK FILLED WITH PEOPLE WAS IGNORING THE CRYING AND SCREAMING.

And now the younger child knows having an opinion involves unpredictable violence from their older siblings, which, let me tell you from experience, sucks as a way to grow up, and makes you more susceptible to other bullying. But hey mommy, at least you don't have to pay attention to your children yourself. Well done.

And if you think this doesn't happen between your children, you are wrong, it does. If you ever deputize your eldests, VERY CLEARLY STATE TO THEM what they are allowed to do to get something done, and that actually, it should be you doing the drudge work of raising your children and not sourcing it out.

Current Mood: FUCK YOU PARENTS

So, I am Doing All The Things to move, now that a job in Berlin is confirmed.

Certified letters to landlords of ten years (I honestly though I'd be in this flat for 6 months in 2008), scheduling movers, talking to friends whether they want anything, temporary AirBnB, making lists. I hate chaos and clutter, and now I am bringing it on to myself, it seems. Lots of it as everything gets upheaved.

In the meantime, the start of this new adventure has me thinking about all the the things I will not be now I am approaching 50. All the new things I did not manage to make happen and can say goodbye to.

And the music starts, from the time I was a teen. Stuck in a an affluent suburb town in the Netherlands, trying to make sense of why nothing made sense about how I should feel, watching music videos on TV the few times they were on. 80s, and they were an American world of neon, of big fridges and people without acne who always had friends, everything in that soft glow, that golden glow I actually came to meet 30 years later when I moved to LA.

It hurts sometimes catching music from those videos, music I was peripherally a fan of and thus have not played to death, have not added new memories to, so all they pull up is the carpet I sat on watching that CRT TV, watching that world of people having fun, being free, wanting to dress as great as they did, be noticed for being cool like they were and not feel like a freak every moment. Every teen thinks there's gotta be something better than this.

And now it is 30 years later and I remember thinking that thought. And I can say I found a lot better than being a closeted awkward lonely mess, but somehow those dreams did not include sitting in an AirBnb on a Saturday night wondering how to make a global city with a global reputation work for you when the last thing you want to do is try to talk to strangers in a place where talking is not what you do with strangers.

There were a lot of better than this things I found, but 17 year olds can never deal with down time, the 17 year old wants the party to be bigger than ever and always on. Yeah, there were better things than this, I found many, but you only came close to the big shiny gold blast a few times in your life; most of it was spent building a decent life and living it. Which 17 year old would ever want to swap the suburb that was killing him for another version of it? I did well, but one voice in here will never think it is enough until life is one endless music video -- except that I am now older than anyone used to be in the.

Door's closed, kid. Deal with it. All our cells have pretty much renewed at least 4 times since then. You're dead. I'm the one who has to keep building with the location and talent and breaks I got.

Current Mood: notalgically desperate
Current Music: Little Red Corvette (Dance Mix) -- Prince

And what I wasn't doing when living in Berlin in AirBnBs, running to meet-ups, answering want ads on three job sites, and waiting by the phone wondering how I was going to find a job without a network of people.

- I did show up to the gym, and worked hard, 5 days a week as usual. First a deal at a Holmes Place, which was nice and expensive, now I have a year-long membership to the cheapie McFit chain, which is always busy.

- I unpack in every new AirBnB and put things away as best I can properly. I may live out of a suitcase partially, but everything has its place and I can find it. I do laundry.

- I get my hair buzzed and a wet shave and beard shaped almost every 3 weeks, in a place I like. I look neat.

- I sleep. My day has shifted from 10AM to 2AM, but I do sleep.

My food was off, though. I was both exploring all snack foods and baking, while going for easy cheap meal options like burgers with sweet potato fries--they are pretty much everywhere in this city. I was limiting my food window to eight hours a day to not do too much damage, but in the end I did get hit by the flu in January and it lasted longer than I wanted.

So because I am not in a some growth or bulking or lean phase, but just trying to be healthy, I went back to Precision Nutrition's food guides, and specifically narrowed down on this lesson about how to fix a broken diet. These are simple recommendations that don't require obsessing, but do require paying attention. I really like the palm, fist, cupped hand system, 3 times a day. They dovetail nicely with the latest research (unsuprising since PN is always on top of that plus their experience of coaching real people) about levels of protein required for someone like me (over 40, lifting weights).

So now I am also dosing daily with multi-vitamin, Omega-oil capsules, and OMG what I found here in Germany: a slow-release Vitamin D bomb you take only once a week. (Does it work? Who knows!) I am feeling better already after 3 weeks back on the wagon.

I am not one to eat a steak and broccoli for breakfast, while most days I should consume two to three palms of dense lean protein per meal. My answer is still unflavored protein powder, which I use in two ways for breakfast.

Currently my AirBnB has one of those smoothie-maker small blender things, so I mix a densely packed fist-sized amount of shredded carrot and one of shredded white cabbage / slaw, 3 scoops of unflavored protein, 100 grams of frozen pineapple slush (so a densely filled cupped hand), and 3 tablespoons of cinnamon. It is not a sweet taste explosion, but it does go down, especially with three thumbs of almonds or pumpkin seeds on the side.

In London, where I have a real blender, I blend a densely packed fist-sized amount of kale and a the same of spinach with some milk, same protein powder, and my favorite current sweetener, erythritol, into slush. I cook that in a pan with a cupped hand of oatmeal and a few tablespoons of cocoa powder into a hot chocolate porridge.

Both carry me easily into late lunch. It is all keeping me optimistic and making plans again about what to do next. Calls are significantly picking up, though, start-of-year hiring is in full swing.

Because I don't want you to feel bad when you think of me

Because I do not need you rushing to my aid

Because I don't want to hear myself explaining again what is wrong

Because I don't want another conversation in which I am a loser

Because what I want is so trivial

Because you'll think what I want is so trivial and why do I bother

Because there's nothing that can be done

Because there's nothing I haven't tried already

Because I can't handle hearing everything will be OK when I don't know how to get there

Because if you do tell me something I haven't tried already, I've obviously been an idiot

Because asking for help is always an admission you don't have it together, and I can't handle losing more face right now

Because I am so tired of getting it wrong, which you have to admit to yourself before you ask for help

Because I am so tired of being wrong, which you have to admit to yourself before you ask for help

Because it means I can't get it together

Because I do not want to feel sorry for myself

Because it means focusing on the negative and I'd rather have good times with you

Because if I don't get it right or better, you will at the very least continue to worry about me. I don't want you to worry

Because if I don't get it right or better, you will think I ignored your advice, and feel I wasted your time

Because you will think less of me for needing help

Because you will get angry at me for again not getting it right

Because I feel stupid enough already

Because it is just how things are and we can't change them anyway

Because all the advice out there actually doesn't work

Because I'll just keep pushing forward anyway, with or without help, and I'd rather not take chances with how you feel about me

Because I am so tired of grasping and trying and treading water and I don't want to talk about it

Because this is just how life is, so what are we gonna do?

Because you have it worse than me in many way and I feel super guilty adding to it

Because I am supposed to be the strong and together one

Because I don't want people panicking and piling on

Because I have all these advantages and I really should not waste them and not need help

Because things aren't that bad, it's gonna be OK anyway

Because I need to do it myself anyway

Because you can not change my luck. I can't change my luck

Because I will punch something if I get a pep talk

I don't what it is with Berlin, but there's hamburger places everywhere, and they are not chains. This is like when I came to London 10 years ago, but back then they actually were all chains. They all serve sweet potato fries. That is good.

I don't understand how most retail in Berlin survives. There is not much of a real downtown, just endless residential 5-or-so-floor apartment buildings with some retail on the first floor. Consequently it all feels like you are walking through a sort of suburb, and then suddenly there's a hat store. Or home made wooden toys. Or knits fashion. I have no idea how these survive: surely there's not enough foot traffic for there to be enough people whose spontaneous need for wooden toy trains can keep a shop like that afloat? Do people come from near and far to get toy trains? How is the demand for those specific knit sweaters manufactured?

Most of Berlin is just trashy. The buildings are very beautiful, those residential blocks with their courtyards behind big doors, but in seemingly 60% of the city, they are all, every single one, tagged. Terrible graffiti, layered, vandalizing. I haven't found my place yet. I know where it is in London, Amsterdam, Edinburgh. The only places that have gripped me here are some cozy small streets in Mitte and the Alexanderplatz end of Prinzlauer Allee, but only the beginning--if you go up North on that it very soon turns dull.

I beat myself up because I had found my London apartment in a month. (It was indeed supposed to be temporary as I would quickly sell The Loft in LA and get a fabulous job so I could buy a great quirky place, two things that didn't happen, and by the time they did London real estate was so on overload that staying in that apartment was the best deal for the next ten years.) It has been 3 weeks here and I have made no progress on housing, but I also need to remember I have not fully commited to Berlin so the standard thing of finding an empty apartment for long term is not what I should do. The temporary furnished apartments on Craigslist are delightful scams--I wrote to 3 of them and got three answers with almost identical addresses about how they bought the flat but now moved to Poland / Russia / Ukraine and needed tennants and once we agreed on money they'd send paperwork and keys. LOL, people. Real landlords arrange for viewings.
I did find where to find the apartments for viewing, but they are all a minimum of 6 months, and I am not that sure yet. And I have no credit rating here, but I hope being able to pre-pay a few months will help with that. For now I found a new 30 days on AirBnB, which is expensive, but only on Berlin terms not London. My current flat, key issues aside, has been glorious: so large, so light. And oh god, this other flat I almost housesat I walked into a few days ago... I had the same feeling I had when I first walked into The Loft in LA, within three steps I knew I Must Live Here. Have only felt that in London once in ten years.

But work, work is nothing. I have one continuing slow interview track going on, and the work seems great, and we need to make the minds meet. I want that gig. But they are talking to many people, and also growing fast. I have gone to one UX meetup, and everyone seemed underemployed. I should go to more but haven't found them. My weak small network was out of town and seems to be coming back. I can't will myself into a job in 3 weeks; it took months when I came to Britain. It just adds to the feeling I am on some kind of exploratory holiday. I have not worked for months a ta time, that's what my life has been like the last few years. This is normal, not a calamity.

I have gotten a ton of personal backlog items done. There's a ton more to do, and I do mean weeding out songs I never listen to from my iTunes and closing very old accounts from my time in the US. Lots of other neighborhoods to walk through, supermarkets and gyms to discover, so I am not bored. And people are hooking me up with people, so every week is a new Berlin moment.
Like last Saturday, arriving at a cocktail bar (it had indeed a waitress among the staff...) at 8Pm and it already being almost full. It was indeed on the ground floor of a residential building in an aforementioned residential neighborhood. It was dark inside, with little clusters of tables and chairs in every corner, or stools using every inch where people might sit. The front door is locked, but glass so you can see inside through it and thre storefront, and see everyone sitting and drinking, cozy inside. They will only open and let you in if they have space for you to sit down, and will then explain they have no menu but will make you whatever classic you ask for but please, no mojitos or piña coladas or, as I worded it and he said he would now quote, other cocktails for people under 18. They also had four specials of the night that they would now explain to you. So there I sat with a FOAF, an American woman who had been coming to Germany for 30 years and now lived in Berlin, as we got to know each other and talked about writing, gods and mortals, living in many places, attitudes towards us, everything, while she sipped on what she considered excellent cokctails and me on amazing lemonades from their specialty syrups, sitting on bar stools, surrounded by a clientele of really normal looking people, and being socially terrified by seeing all these people throughout the night walk up, in the drizzle, to the front door, knock on it, see us sitting dry inside, and be completely ignored by staff until they sadly trundled off.

I am ambivalent about being here, but definitely not bored.

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FJ!!'s Neglected Personal Blog

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