Bedsurfing Berlin

My sleeps here, because I’ve been next to a man (last week a stranger, this week an acquaintance) is sporadic, like I wake up and feel his hair brushing against my elbow and I shift closer to the edge of the bed because I know, it's like an essential truth, this isn’t my bed (it's the half-sleep of a watcher or squatter). As soon as he gets up and out my body sighs of relief, it actually curves into an S, Something relaxed not Sensual, my head falls deeper into the pillow, my arm wrap tighter around whatever and eight hours of tension melts away with the help of a rising sun.

(To my generous couchsurfing host, R---, to whom I owe, if not good rest, then everything else that shouldn't be taken for granted)

Love,
Winston

slow

I should want a second to be slower than a decade so to say I've tasted a century, a millennium... and then in that second to forget and forgo time entirely.

This is a wish of mine.

(flohmarkt am mauerpark, Berlin, July 2010)

how now my why Berlin

You won’t get a real answer if you ask me why I’m in Berlin. The only true, albeit shortened, response is long, in which you’d have to let me trace behavioral patterns to demonstrate that my going to Berlin is really no different than spending a day’s allowance on a jar of muscadet honey, a take-away curry wurst and an assortment of German gummy bears (notice, all these things I have never tasted until today)…

It is Berlin, and it is not just Berlin that brought me here. It without a doubt is the compulsion to up and leave that pushed and continues to push me away from comfort, routine, friends and family. Berlin is secondary to the compulsion, whose kinetic force will drive me from here, soon, too.

One thing though has changed since Paris at seventeen – I no longer expect to discover something altogether better. Newness, I’ve come to realize (what with all of the money I’ve blown on “new” foods in foreign supermarkets, for example) teases me with the promise of something tantalizing, beyond imagination, something ideal, something—and here’s the clutch—inhuman. The actual result and the old usurper of my unconscious anticipation, named confusion or just bland banality, prompts the opposite of disappointment. Yes, two negatives make a positive, and I find my senses opened, my mouth ajar with a dropped jaw a sideways smile and a chuckle.

Time to get to work, I can’t wait to get to work, when I settle into my studio next week.

NIGHT SWEATS 2

Part two, I bonding-breakfasted with L---- who slept opposite me these past three nights in Aloha Hostel’s 8-bed dorm room, and maybe within our first thirty minutes of conversation we opened up the lid on sleep, engaged with the ghost, shiver-shiver-freaked a little about our shared “sleep paralysis” afflictions. Ah! For each of us, two nights of severed consciousness and psychical intestinal ruptures!

The question superseded the conflict of answers—chemical imbalance, spiritual sensitivity—and settled on, “What could have happened in this building?” This is Berlin, built upon people over people upon people, dead and now alive. Who, what, where, when, why, and how at 60 Torstrasse, Berlin, Germany?...

NIGHT SWEATS

If you believe in ghosts, take this at face value | If you don't believe in ghosts, decipher the metaphor for me (please)

Aloha Hostel, Berlin, deserves a positive review on hostelbookers.com save for the debatably German debatably female ghost that's kept me awake for two nights straight -- I think she has long hair, and I think she died by stomach trauma because she won't stop churning mine.

Sleep paralysis is my family's affliction, we are a sensitive bunch.

This is when I wish the ol' garlic trick were true, or maybe a cross on the headboard and a silver chain 'round the neck. But only superstitions can be dispelled with more superstitions, and my night sweats tormenter is very real, and very annoying.

Welcome to Berlin, besides her I love it.

continuums

The moment after I'm here (here is Paris, is lunch in my temp apartment, is a window wracked with rain), then I'm there, and there's nothing to hold onto except maybe the ghost of an image. I think this all started ten days ago when I turned 22.

(Photo from weekend at La Baule, Brittany, France)

Good night, Boston, Good bye

My youth art projects in skyward sparks: Tiger, he burned up through and through, I believe, I mean four years of waiting does expedite release

Thanks, dad, for helping me set him free; and tonight, when I, too, ascend, the glistening of steel wings in the clouds -- that's both of us waving goodbye.