Someday I may retire from culture and propriety to become a naked farmer. This requires: financial independence, a fair amount of land in the middle of nowhere, a steady supply of sunscreen, a double-barelled paint-ball gun, and a porch with a rocking chair. Certainly a lot of other things, as well, but I think if I could learn the exact way not to get splinters in unholy places while I sit on my front steps and chew sourgrass, and if maybe I could learn to play the banjo in the dark when the generator goes out, I could be very happy for a time. At least, I wonder what kind of things I would dream about then.

Today is another one of those days, with the sun so low in the sky it seems like a threat. There are boys with no hands on their bicycles cutting too close to the tram, palms cupped to the curves of their eyebrows, riding blindly but probably still thinking ‘let me not go blind before I get home.’ I keep tripping on steps just inside doors, where everything feels subterranean because my glasses haven’t adjusted yet. I should stop wearing golf shoes where there is no grass. I should wear golf shoes every day to make well sure that I don’t go a single one without finding some waterlogged lawn somewhere.*

In Berlin I made myself illegal on the underground, riding too many trains black. The value of a coin is much higher here and so money seems much heavier - maybe that is what makes it so much easier to waste. There is much more levity with paper, but still metal is so happy to remind you with its sing-song clattering that it exists not to fidget grossly in your pocket but to be spent. And spent. And spent. It is funny what becomes important. I am not poor, I am not unhappy, but I cheat the subway and I avoid buying a mattress. I have a craving for the smell and the feel of the local record store that could easily develop into a costly addiction. I try not to go inside; I don’t have a phonograph.

This country is beautiful. That I am more and more able to say this no matter what borders surround me does not diminish that fact. I spent twelve hours getting to Berlin and twelve getting back, on about twelve different trains, passing through innumerable stations wrecked and repaired innumerable times. I recommend this kind of taxing travel to everyone. For a second, at some stops, you can belong with all the fern that grows out of defunct boxcars in shamelessly quaint hamlets and all the hamlet-sized lots full of jon deer tractors on the outer rims of bigger towns. It rains and the sky is just an eggshell lit from the outside with what must be the rest of your life. It doesn’t rain and the clouds are criminally dynamic, in the way that contrast can sometimes harvest a lung or two.

The world is really too large a place. Sometimes I wish so fervently that we were still confined to the places we could walk or force some bridled animal to run, if only so that I’d have time to learn each inch of the known universe and make it belong to my heart in some way. Here, this is the place where something of utmost importance happened. But everything is all terrible glory and expanse. I pick important things at random, because everything is vast and possible, even for a pessimist.

Here is one:

In Berlin there is a long, thick block of cemeteries. Lovely, well kept cemeteries with corners full of uprooted tombstones that belong to men too long dead to be remembered. You cannot enter these from the back, but if you find the road behind them you’ll see what looks like a prison, and a sportsfield, and also the other side of the graveyard wall. This is where the city goes to write its love notes. Syrka, Ich liebe dich, it says. Ekim, Ich liebe dich. Johanna, Ich liebe dich. It is an entire stretch devoted to the kind of melodramatic honesty that is so vital. Dear god, I hope gorgeous, pimply kids will be forever tagging that kind of eternal youth to the place where people end. Even (or especially) if they later write, as someone did, Wir sind so wie diese kaputte mauer.

*maybe I should learn to golf?