drugs

I never know what other people are doing

/ Narvik

She said,

Is it as cold and dark as you imagined?

I said,

Hi.

I think I took too much acid.

Actually I think probably I took the right amount for many situations

But I am alone in the Arctic

And want to make the right choices.

Itʼs funny how I can still operate this horrible hand machine that controls everything.

She said,

What kind of space are you in?

I said,

I don’t know.

What are the units.

She said,

Where actually are you

I said,

Narvik.

 

She said,

You are NORTH.

I said,

Yeah

I really should put on my clothes and go find the northern lights

Itʼs why Iʼm fucking here.

She said,

That would be good, and how?

I said,

I think climb a mountain and wait.

God this thing in my hands is a monster.

She said,

Are there other people around who are looking for lights?

I said,

Hard to say.

I never know what other people are doing.

this episode was written...

into a text
with Jean
from Norway
on arctic + atmosphere + device + drugs + geography + holiday + night + psychedelic + sky + snow

I never know what other people are doing Read More »

whole row to myself

/ New York City

Is there any way I am so lucky as to have the whole row to myself on this overnight flight from Kennedy to Copenhagen?

The cartoon passengers in the Norwegian Air safety video are so white as to arouse my suspicion. Also the oxygen masks in premium seats reportedly require some additional action, some pulling of a cord, that those for economy seats do not. Suffocate the rich? Interesting.

The fat and pale analog humans drinking Coca Cola at eleven thirty at night across the aisle are staring as I swallow the Unisom recommended by my gynecologist in lieu of the Ambien prescription I wanted and the half a Klonopin I found among the dregs of some party past and later on learned how to spell.

Ah, here are my rowmates.

Too bad for me.

Perhaps they will be more tolerable for whatever disposition makes them almost unable to make a flight.

this episode was written...

into her journal
from the US of America
on airplane + class + drugs + instruction + passengers + prescription + race + safety + sleep + transit

whole row to myself Read More »

missing manuel

/ Berlin
My main friend here, Manuel—the German bass for hire with the baby face I befriended on the boat across the Baltic—dropped offline for the days remaining before he disappeared back into Denmark for the weekend, which was disappointing because I wanted to party with him and also because he’d left town with my sunglasses still on his coffee table, locked inside his apartment, seventeen stories above Kreuzberg. But also I am glad to have been forced by boredom-stronger-than-fear—after these days spent in the twee Prenzlauerberg cafés and apartment, writing and hustling for my next accommodations and clinging to the internet for comfort—to investigate the city alone.
Wednesday I made a friend I didn’t like as much as Manuel, a Syrian immigrant who worked in the vegan cafe where I had two lattes with mammal milk, and we made a plan for him to show me around yesterday, but then he canceled. Instead I went to Tempelhofer Feld in search of a hike, and now I would like a word with whoever put that on a list of hikes, because it is more like a long walk on some bricks around some fields where there once was and may or may not still be ammunition. I did however sunbathe topless (!!! woo) in one of the fields. Also on the walk to the park from the U8 station I found a tomato, so now I have a tomato. Later I bought weed for twenty dollars American from a Nigerian guy on, I think, Hermanstraße, so now I have weed. Then I FINALLY went to an ATM—it had pizza smeared all over the screen, like someone thought that was a good thing to do with their time and pizza—and with my new euro got terrible Moroccan food at a place somewhere else in Neukölln where the proprietor addressed me in Spanish and I just rolled with it. Then I followed some signs for an English-language comedy show at the bar across the street and surprised myself by having a great time. Lots of jokes about the availability of drugs in Berlin (which is, evidently, ample), and some about the German sense of humor (which is, evidently, not good). I could tell that the last comedian was a good comedian, but I hated listening to him because he talked about dating in New York City and being Jewish on the USAmerican Atlantic coast, which is not what I came to Europe to think about. The bartenders were all Italian and didn’t like me as much as I liked them. I made another friend, an Anglo-Serbian voice actor, and I might like him as much as I like Manuel (unsure), except I think that what what I thought was a wedding ring might just be a ring, so now I have to play defense. He convinced me that Belgrade is where I want to be, except again for the cigarette smoke.
In his goodbye-until-Monday note, Manuel suggested I reach out if there was trouble so he could refer me to a friend.
I said, Like what? Again, all I can think of is nuclear winter, but I’m hoping that the only real trouble will be that I can’t wear my contact lenses because I only have my prescription sunglasses, which is when you think about it a pretty good life.

this episode was written...

into the blog
from Germany
on comedy + drugs + elsewhere + finding + food + friends + jokes + Judaism + language + marijuana + money + network + park + planning + sunglasses + walk
featuring Oliver

missing manuel Read More »

where the stall door bottoms

/ Berlin

~ i wrote ~

I found the real community-of-party design genius in the bathroom, where the stall door bottoms stop a good six or nine inches above the toilet seat, such that I imagine anyone with the inclination could get a good look at the user’s netherparts — the face is what’s kept private — which is not so excellent an arrangement for an uneasy American who has come alone and dressed all wrong (yoga clothes?? Backpacking I may be, but in hindsight it was the worst possible solution I could’ve settled on with the tools at my disposal) and is sweating at the ever-growing prospect that she will have to spend the night dancing sober with the cello-wrapped cardboard cartridge she fashioned to smuggle in a joint and some scraps of psychedelica lodged in her vagina because she cannot get it out and, without the aid of its contents, won’t have the disposition to solicit a stranger in this sort-of sex club for help.

It’s a fine length for taking drugs in a group in a standing position, though, and after I got the thing out and made some friends I partook of a few additional substances in a few additional stalls with a hardbodied oncologist wearing perfect Aryan features whom I later enjoyed watching in some kind of heated and highly homoerotic exchange with the Persian radiologist who’d initially drafted me into their circle, and later still after that, when Omar came to me and said, Dieter say maybe you like to go for threesome with us, I said, Why, yes, maybe I would. Because I mean, wow, that’s the dream. Hot boys who want to make out with each other and let me watch AND do stuff with me? Ja, bitte schön, und danke.

But it turned out that Dieter doesn’t actually like Omar that much, and that Omar is more like some sort of blowhard, a talker of big game, and in the cab ride — they ridiculed my wanting to walk — This isn’t New York, they said — they arrived, beyond my linguistic ken, at some agreement that, actually, Omar had to work in a few hours and would be bailing, and Dieter and I would be on our own. Regarding which I thought, Thank the gods, for going home with a man met on a night out has almost never gone well for me — they don’t understand! How rarely they understand — and this promised, actually, to be exactly that times two. And the titillating closeness of their bodies and faces as they smiled and argued in a hazy, throbbing toilet was a far cognitive cry from the 6 am silence and brilliance of Germany in June, and how on earth could I have found my way from the other back to the one?

this episode was written...

into an email
with Birdie
from Germany
on adventure + all night long + attire + body + cityscape + club + community + culture + design + drugs + gratitude + help + language + party + relations + sex + toilet

where the stall door bottoms Read More »

crash his mouth

/ Berlin

~ i wrote ~

When we got to Dieter’s apartment — enormous — something like 130 sq meters overlooking the river in central Berlin, €2,000 a month — and gorgeous, just gorgeous, like something out of a design catalogue, thanks to the space itself and also I gather to his roommate the polymathic hematologist, he played me some classical piano and fed me a cucumber from the terrace garden and we each showered and got into his bed for what I, twitching from drugs and a day-and-night awake, hoped would be sleep. His whole body was shaved — more recently than his face, I noticed, but perhaps that was by design, for its shadow was the perfect chic length, except for the unseeable-by-him rim where deep chin becomes upper neck, where the hair was embarrassingly overlong — and the effect was one of all-over coarse, sandpapery stubble that I very much would have been up for having slowly slid over my amphetamine-alert skin, but he was determined to crash his mouth repeatedly into my general pubic area if we were to touch at all, which was just stupid and terrible; perhaps the concept of taking mutual tactile pleasure without specific orgasm-orientation per se doesn’t translate, or perhaps this particular guy was just too dumb. I mean, read the room, Man. After a while, I tired of fighting him off and got up and put my stinking yoga outfit back on and took the U5 three stops in the wrong direction, into the suburbs, and then I figured it out and got off that train and took another, inbound one back in to Alexanderplatz and walked to my digs, the hochparterre in Prenzlauer Berg where my grad school friend’s ex lives with his wife and baby when they are not in New Haven for her twentieth reunion and more, the closest thing I have here to home.

this episode was written...

into an email
with Birdie
from Germany
on all night long + cityscape + design + drugs + men + real estate + sex + transit

crash his mouth Read More »

Scroll to Top