history

where are the black people

I’m liking it well enough here, I guess, but where are all the Black people? There are very, very few, and most of the ones I’ve met are African immigrants to Germany, Senegalese and Nigerian men in Michael Jordan jerseys who sell me crummy weed at exorbitant prices because they are savvy and I am wide-eyed and high on novelty and fairly begging for the authentic! cultural!! experience!!! of being taken for a ride in a strange land, plus the bassist from the band from Madagascar that played at Carnival of Cultures, and one Jamaican rapper I encountered at same, the latter of whose black-and-green-and-yellow things I gravitated to for homesickness for Flatbush, one presumes.
I guess I’ve been looking for the Black people speaking and dressed more or less like this nation’s natives. African-Prussian Vernacular German, anyone? But how does a place come to have such a population if previous residents didn’t specifically travel overseas to the African continent and kidnap and bring back and enslave and force foreign names and language on enough African people that, over generations, a new dimension of civilization eventually comes into being? I don’t know enough about this. Someone told me I’ll see more Black people in the clubs, but who are those people, and where are they the rest of the time?

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alone at last and also all of a sudden

~ i wrote ~

Amazingly, alone at last and also all of a sudden, Dieter and I found we actually sort of liked each other in the particular bewitchment of Berlin at dawn. We spent a long time standing in front of an old synagogue that’s now a gallery of Judaica, and I made him read to me over and over the historical signage in German with all its bone-chilling verbs as punchline, and then he started trying to coach me through it — Diese synagogue ist 100 Jahre alt und wurde am 9. November 1938 (and yes saying the year was too difficult) IN DER KRISTALLNACHT von den Nazis in Brand gesteckt — and then to teach me to count in German, but I kept getting to nine and forgetting the word for ten, and he suggested some associative conditioning and began hitting and shoving me, shouting zehn! zehn! and it was very, very sexy, an excellent fulfillment of whatever has been incubating since the tender age when I was made to watch all those movies of fearsome square-jawed Prussians. Anyway, at the end of it all, I’m thinking Sieben is an excellent name for a child.

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come hang out

I said,

I just stepped out off the path down the mountain onto the beach

The plan is to go see the iconic abandoned Dionysus statue because I leave here tomorrow and have yet to pay my respects to pagan idolatry as ancient as anything else human I have access to

But what I really want is to walk into the water with my clothes on

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