I’ve been thinking about how my typewriter will be a great friend-making device on my impending journey to a strange land, but also, there is a coffee shop in my neighborhood that I have been asked not to come back to and it’s because someone complained on the internet about me — I found the stuff and it was not so nice and used the word “Jurassic” — so I guess also the typewriter is a good way to make enemies.
Now I have walked the river feeling envious of people laughing and eating and canoodling on blankets. Lax or no prohibition against open containers, apparently. Danish flags are everywhere, I’m not sure why. Maybe it’s National Denmark Day? I am sitting on some benchy step-type things above the canal in Christianhavn and watching a raven tear at the shredded lettuce and whatever else is inside some crumpled sandwich paper left by a trio of thuggish Danes who were supping here until recently, when they left without first becoming my friends.
I think I’ll take a walk over to Freetown Christiania, maybe buy a joint, see if that’ll help me sleep during a time more broadly regarded here as night. Yes. And on the way I will scan the ground for generous bits of remaindered cigarettes with which to roll a spliff.
One fellow in a clump of drunken others still eating sandwiches and getting drunker in the vicinity is singing Destiny’s Child.
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.
