Remember that time the band crashed on your floor and your cats peed on my sleeping bag? I was thinking about it even then. The whole drive home, in fact, I was fervently imagining the better world, out there, waiting for me.
In the storage room at Andy’s house in Chicago, in the sleeping bag (as we were leaving, you, a mohawked midwestern twentysomething, had mumbled, “hey dude, it’s punk rock. And, you were sleeping in Missy’s favorite spot”), contemplating my present place in space and time and finding it, as usual, inexplicable- my mind wandered back, once again, to fixate on a brief conversation I’d had with Krawalla, in 1999. I had said, Berlin seems like it would be a cool city to live in, and she’d offered me a room in her apartment available immediately; I explained that I had a job and the band going on back at home, which got me an invitation to join her band and a list of possible job options that all sounded better than the one I had. Yeah, I’d thought enthusiastically, this seems like it would be a pretty cool city to live in, but then the conversation had veered on into something else or I’d gotten distracted from the future possibility by the now of some great graffiti mural or weird old building. That conversation replays itself in my head and I realize that that was it, the moment to jump ship, and I missed it, ten years later, no matter how much time goes by, I’ll always have missed it.
But, actually: as anyone who has walked the plank can tell you, there is not one brief, momentary opportunity to jump ship. It can take all day. And so I missed plenty of other opportunities too, over time, and each time I did, the myth of what I was missing became that much more amplified and compelling to me. Oh, that roiling sea, and the tantalizing continents beyond it!
Utopia achieved: single apartment, Zionskirchstrasse, Berlin. This is literally my wildest dream, the fallback fantasy I would turn to whenever my life seemed too rough or uncivilized. My imagined life here was so nice, so pain-free and flawlessly executed, that it almost atoned for my actual life, with its various wrong turns and disastrous collision courses. Somewhere else, in some alternate reality, I was living in Prenslauerberg and doing everything right.
It’s strange to have your wildest dream snatched from you; it gives you less to dream about. It makes being depressed inconvenient: when things go wrong or get trying, where am I supposed to wish I’d rather be now? And doing what?
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