This Is The End

The desk fan goes whuppa whuppa whuppa in the humid Berlin bog.  I take my donuts in my left hand and prepare to leave the place where thousands have come and gone before.  I stuff them in my mouth, verily, one at a time, in remembrance of Berlin.  The thousands first, then the donuts.  I am voracious.

Where?  The Next.  The next cheap place where creative people go to piss about and throw fairy dust at the sky while waiting for the wrecking ball. We won't be assimilated.  There was a respectable time in human history wherein one could live and die in fields or coal mines.  Now there is only the sad promise of a sad cubicle in a sad office space.  Moving up?  Nosir.  Moving down.  Give me black lung disease, motherfucker.  At least my body will die before my brain.

The Next Place will have donuts.  Yes, they will be the death of me, but I choose a glorious, deep-fried, jelly-filled sugar coma.  Alcohol will be my anesthesiologist.  He's the only one I trust.  I will go there, to The Next Place, and start another blog.

Maybe it will be titled something like Notes of an Old Fart.  I'm pushing 50.  It would be a good time to give up the donuts and go for the laxatives.

This is the end, my friend.

But only of my life in Berlin.  In the past 20 years in England, Ireland, Czech Republic and Germany, it has always been a bit unsettling when The Big Change comes round. Then I settle in.  Then I move on.

There will be other lives in other cities.

Sucking the Jelly Out of the Berliner

A provocative title indeed, one which suggests either:

A)  I've been too busy to post because I have embarked on a lucrative career in the Poor But Sexy city of Berlin, one which precludes any rants on counter culture and/or general annoyances on the lack of proper salsa for my boo ree toes.

B)  I've finally given up my creative dream and have begun a career of sucking.  Something or someone.

To answer those 23 of you who have followed my scratchings thusfar:

NONE OF THE ABOVE.

Still here, still doing The Thang, but less of it.  I did in fact suck down drei pfannkuchen mit kirsch last week; it was the first time in months.  Apparently I'm too fat.  My wife keeps telling me that.

Oh yeah!  I also got married on Thanksgiving Thursday, November 28, 2013 in Gibraltar.  I didn't pick that date.  They did.  We took it.  We're thankful.

Coming to the end of another apartment lease, I have to wonder:

A)  Has our time come?  Have the hipsters and yuppies/yummies finally got a stranglehold on all the available rentals left in Berlin?

B)  When you ask for a reason why you can't renew your lease, your landlord replies "It is a free market.  We can rent to whoever we choose," do you think there's some sort of underground conspiracy going on?

C)  Should I get medieval on some asses?

D)  Where's the next city/country/haven?

I don't care that they blame the hipsters and creatives for ruining Berlin.  Hell, I do the same damn thing on every other blog post.  I do a sticky-sweet donut post, then I do a sour, bitter rant to balance it out.  Maybe that too is a conspiracy; one which plans to lead my very few readers on a bittersweet up and down rollercoaster ride which ends in them clicking on the bipolar pill advert on the right.

Oh yeah, they kicked me off the ad program for foul language.  Well, at least I kept my fucking dignity.

I can't say much more except to say that someone has said it all before--and better--than my humble self.

One such example of How Things Got Fucked in Berlin:

http://thebaffler.com/past/sacking_berlin

Read it and weep.  Or come here and buy a fucking condo.  Frankly my dear, I don't give a damn.

db

It's the End of The World as We Know It (and I Feel Fine)

So what’s this mumbo jumbo about Mayan calendars and the end of the world?  I don’t pay attention to the classic crackpots with the signs saying ‘The End is Nigh,’ so this should come as no surprise when I have to cry BULLSCHEISSE! and let slip the dogs of sanity.  Everyone with half a brain knows that the fuckin’ world ain’t gonna end any time soon.  And if it did, would it be forecast by ass clowns on a mud hut pyramid 2000 years ago between human sacrifices?  And then, would it be all of sudden like?  Ka-BOOM!?

Entropy takes its sweet time.  It’s a one way ticket to midnight, all going down. You see, all matter breaks down into lesser forms of matter over time.  The ice in your glass melts in the hot room, your car runs itself into the ground and the food in your mouth gets reduced into inert matter (aka scheisse).  Can the End of the World™ happen in one day?  Only in the minds of religious freaks and other weak minded, superstitious fools.  The fundamentalist born again Christians believe that they will literally be yanked by the hair by Jesus up into the clouds.  They call this The End Times, The Rapture, and some other gobbledygook I couldn’t quite follow in Sunday school.  Some of those weaker minded fools in the church who couldn’t quite grok it grew up, grew a beard, drew a sign and did the Thorazine Shuffle on Main Street.

Religious nuts and other feeble minded people believe the most ludicrous things.  Global warming doesn’t exist in the conservative, religious mind.  Because the earth doesn’t matter; belongs to Satan, it does.  Jesus will yank all those believers up by their hair into Heaven.  The rest of us will have to deal with the Zombie Apocalypse.  Or Satan and his minions.  One of those two events.

We love endings.  In films, happy ones.  In real life, apparently, we only want the whole fucking thing to fall apart—suddenly—so we don’t have to think about our own individual oblivion.  If everyone is going with you into the abyss at once, it ain’t so lonely now, is it?  Think of the huge popularity of the zombie films.  The first zombie films had them taking over the small town malls.  Now every other film and tv show that’s NOT about vampires is about zombies taking over the world.  All of it.  From Tokyo to Tennessee. A few years ago when facebook was new, I hit the ‘like’ button on something called ‘The Zombie Apocalypse.’  It was an event I could attend.  I think the date is coming soon, probably right around the time the Mayans ran out of calendar pages.  I like a good social parody and the Zombie Walk flash mobs you hear about.  I’m hoping that I’ll open my door soon and see my zombie neighbor eating my landlord.  That will be a most excellent start for the end of the world for me.  Then I don’t have to pay rent, YEEE-HAAAWWWW!!!

Mayans, shmayans.  What did they know? Nice pyramids, nice hot sauce, nice human sacrifice. The irony was that the real end of the Mayan world happened five minutes after they wrote the calendar.  It was off by a few thousand years; it was just over the hills, sporting metal helmets, spearheads and the Spanish language.  I suspect these conquistadors even had a dusty bible or two in their luggage.

Things fall apart; it’s scientific.