Nach Berlin

Nach Berlin! Tomorrow. Morgen. I am less excited than I thought I would be. It is also understandable. Aversion to change is directly proportional to age. And there is this anticipation, that 24 will treat me to a common fridge (the compartments of which, bien sur, will all be occupied by the time I'm there) and the toilet three stories below. So hard not to be excited...

8

It is hard to believe, but I have been writing this blog for almost 8 years. I occasionally re-read older posts, and it is very basic stuff, but it also reminds me what great times I'd had. And I realize that it has been a pretty sweet life. The things I wrote, say, in 2008, are pretty basic, but I can now sense an important and maybe not very happy development. I used to be able to give in to the happening, sort of feel it on a very basic unmediated level. Today, it seems, all that is going on with me is subject to a bright and unfriendly light, like in a hospital, which makes it that much more difficult to be happy or excited about things.  Although I will probably be thinking the same thought 5 years later.

Encounters

I had a very simple plan yesterday, to go to my favourite Irish pub, have a pint and read or write in the sun for an hour or two. Instead, I was careless enough to strike a conversation with an elderly Dutch geographer who would tell stories about lion cubs in a hotel room in East Berlin, a Napoleonic war reenactment in Grodno, and even spending two weeks in Šilutė (!). He kept on paying for the rounds, so how can I say no, but five or maybe six beers and a similar number of hours later, on my way back home I got seriously lost. I think it was my first drinking and driving event of this magnitude, and I have pleasantly surprised myself by not getting into an accident, but at some point I found myself on a highway towards, perhaps, the Hague. I must have taken a wrong turn somewhere. What probably tipped me of is that there were no more biking lanes - something that never really happens within the confines of Amsterdam. And all this, by the way, in spite of me consulting my GPS-ready phone all the time (while driving, naturally). Amsterdam is tricky. What saved me in the end, perhaps, is that the farther from the center you go, the less intricate and knotty its roads become.

im Juni

There's too much to recount, so I won't. Instead, well, first of all, this is my song of the year. And second, hm, here is a nice dream I've had. A very pleasant romance with a Zoe Kazan lookalike. I was helping a girl with a zipper at an apparel store and as I was having a realization of the "she is the one" variety and also feeling that I, perhaps, never want her to be any farther from me than she was then (very close), she must have had a similar thought because we, as it were, fell into each other's arms with some kind of perfect synchronicity. The sensation of her soft waist through a pitch dark blouse, it bugs me how real it felt. Does it begin to sound like porn? There was no porn. And of course no dream of mine comes without a healthy dose of weird, because it immediately acquired a an extra layer of reality and turned into a video game with bonus points for every successful romantic accomplishment (meet the parents: aced it) but also featuring unpleasantly cynical metacommentary. Every success came with a reminder that this is, in fact, the way it usually goes anyway and that this is, in fact, how you run out of things to accomplish and sink into drudgery, or, alternatively, just fail at some point and it's all over, which is the same thing. I don't know if there were any points for dying or bonus points for dying prematurely.