Berkeley Bike

the drops of rain were spaced out and pattered on my face as i walked down the street with the rainbow of flowers. houses nestled among the greenness and the concrete. the man in a lilac pinstriped suit with matching shiny purple loafers and a black felt cap put some stuff in his sedan. the mini brown boy with the close cropped hair protected me from his dog with the smiling tail. i looked away as a squirrel ran out to meet a moving car. then the both disappeared. the wide smiling young man with the funny square blond beard and rolled up jeans cycled past as i looked for a gap in the traffic. he was smiling at me. the black man breaking apart a tree trunk section with a wedge and a mallet. "hi" i said timidly. "how you doin?" he answered and kept chopping.

My co-worker is outraged that the free summer concerts here will no longer allow BYOB and are going to start selling and regulating alcohol. He's threatening to petition and write letters to the town council.

Three chance meetings in one day! And 2 of them gave me rides. Such perfect timing. It feels like I'm in sync with the Universe today, or maybe it's just because I live in a small town. :-)
Yesterday evening everything clicked too. A friend had a free ticket to "The Painted Veil" at the Aspen Film Fest, so I went along. Afterwards we were hanging out in the lobby drinking free wine and bourbon when a woman offered us 2 free tickets to the next show-"Pan's Labyrinth"! My eyes are fried today after 8 hours of computer time in the office and then 4 hours of film.
This afternoon I had a real Aspen moment sitting outside a coffee shop sipping and overpriced too small cappuccino. The dyed blond boob job dangly earring 40 something (adoptive?) mom was sitting with her exposed cleavage oozing out of a sheer black bra and her made up 11 year old accompanied by their pet Savannah mix cat that looked at acted like a baby cheetah on a 1 ft leash. "Oh my god! What an adorable cat!" admired the passersby. "The markings are soooo amazing! What kind is it? How old is it? What kind is it again? Savannah and what? Oh wow!"

If you don't know pandora you should definitely check it out!

Another day in front of a computer with my back to the mountain village sewage plant that's buried under mound of dirt. Amazing how I can make an incredibly beautiful part of the world sound like a shit hole.
It seems that mid-winter is when I'm always down and trying to figure out my life, rather than living it. The trapped no-future feeling coincides with cold darkness. At least the darkness here isn't nearly as thick as in Berlin.

Sometimes I dare to hope that we Americans will acknowledge our brutal history based genocide and oppression. Today's sub-heading, Tribal Underworld makes that such a ridiculous idea. I'm still waiting for the heading "WASP Colonialism" to appear on the front page of the NYT.

In case there was any doubt, this article has reaffirmed that artists actually are sex-crazed lunatics.

This city of frozen passion streches, yawns and a burp of Spring escapes. Then it rolls over onto it's side, pulls it's knees up and goes back to sleep.

David Shrigley-Caveman

The video "Who I Am and What I Want" was dismaying. I found it quite misogynistic. In this video the only images of women were negative. One was a 3/4 back view of a bending-over, naked woman giving birth to an egg. Then there's a woman in a street scene getting punched in the face by a man. And the third image is of a huge vagina (bigger than the main character himself) that turns out to be attached to a pathetically horny, panting woman in gyn exam position. The man sees her and walks away disgusted. This is definitely not what he wants. Instead he prefers to return to the forest and watch a pig drown, while babbling on about what he does want.
The video was perhaps about primitivism, but it seems that the mind of the artist has not evolved beyond this primitivism to be able to comment on it. Instead he portrays men as barbaric creatures, who hate women and enjoy biting heads off live birds. The video is rife with an adolescent smattering of phallic symbols and violence. Women are vaginas, weak, pathetic and birthing necessities. Men are more complex- they enjoy killing, belittling one another, hunting each other, watching suffering, dismembering animals; nonetheless, they maintain congnizant of their place in the world, their desires and their sense of identity.

paint peels from the walls and turrets of 14th street. the signs remind me of old small town signs that were old when i was a child. sunshine hits the garage on the corner just right and it's all so full. there's a pile of mushy leaves and trash behind the bus stop where a doughy brown woman is blowing her nose. i walk past. protected. separate. alien. i'm the observer on the other side of the 2 way mirror.

is culture shock when you get annoyed about the way things work in a country? i seem to have this problem everywhere i go. i just need my own planet.

In this neighborhood there is stability and the ooze of excess seeping out from under the door of every house. The sidewalk tiles make me feel at home although I haven't lived on a street with a sidewalk like that since 1984.

homesickness is just wanting to be somewhere else. tiredness of the humming of one rhythm and longing for the clip clop of another.

darkness and more darkness. it's inescapable. i want the sun back.

the first snow! yea! yipee!

So, after these next few weeks of working my ass off, I'm going to get myself connected to the real world again with high speed internet. Then I will blog more and not feel like I am living in the 19th century as my coal heater insists.

belly full of coffee and a fuzzy head. dirty sweater-no shirt, naked tree. stasi doping, sunshine, procrastination.

I don't understand German men. They don't flirt, and the only ones who do, tell you about their girlfriend in the second sentence. Jesus-fucking-Christ! What does it take to get some in this city!?

Right now I'm homesick for the feeling of reading the New York Times on Saturday morning. I miss the cab rides through midtown and the dates and the late nights getting plastered.
It's getting cold and dark early. I'm already starting to count down until the end of the dark months. It seems like I should be counting down to the beginning of the dark months. Again, I feel like I've completely missed summer.