One day I will die. Of liver failure or diabetes or by getting hit by a car or, my preferred version, in a spectacular explosion after I’ve saved my wife and the world from a megalomaniac madman. If I’m lucky, someone will sift through my notebooks and find something useful for other people to read, but most likely my books and kitchen chairs and tea kettle will end up in one of the shops in Wedding that buy household clearances en bloc. And no one will care about the fact that I once sat in front of the castle in Olsztyn with a beer, smoking my pipe and watched the sun set behind the ramparts and the forest. And neither shall I.

Stepping from the train from Constanța felt like disembarking in a war zone, near the final battle against alien invaders. Over the Black Sea a thunderstorm was raging, illuminating the towering night clouds every few minutes with flashing lightning, like artillery fire in the distance. Papers lanterns carrying candles were drifting across the sky like flaming pieces of debris, and the rotating bright green and red floodlights and thudding bass sounds of the beachfront clubs reminded me of searchlights and autocannons. We shouldered our bags and started walking towards our apartment, together with the throng of the other party recruits. We had arrived in Costineşti.

In Dublin, in summer, tracksuited men still sit in cafes and stare at the French and Polish waitresses, wishing they would sleep with them.

“Berlin is large and cruel, madness sprouts from the asphalt, it lurks in nooks and crannies, it waits for you behind this, behind that corner. It glows in the eyes of your seatmate on the tram, it is the motor that powers the tram, the machines, the elevators, the vacuum cleaners, it rules administration and housing offices; it steers the automobiles to run you over; it whirrs in the electrical wires so that their high tension hits you, it moves the revolving door, it shovels you into the bar dancing to the jazz band. It sits at the roulette table and conducts the game and ruins you. Up! Run away into the madhouse!”

- Joseph Roth

by Czeslaw Milosz

‘“So lasting they are, the rivers!” Only think. Sources somewhere in the mountains pulsate and springs seep from a rock, join in a stream, in the current of a river, and the river flows through centuries, millennia. Tribes, nations pass, and the river is still there, and yet it is not, for water does not stay the same, only the place and the name persist, as a metaphor for a permanent form and changing matter. The same rivers flowed in Europe when none of today’s countries existed and no languages known to us were spoken. It is in the names of rivers that traces of lost tribes survive. They lived, though, so long ago that nothing is certain and scholars make guesses which to other scholars seem unfounded. It is not even known how many of these names come from before the Indo-European invasion, which is estimated to have taken place two thousand to three thousand years B. C. Our civilization poisoned river waters, and their contamination acquires a powerful emotional meaning. As the course of a river is a symbol of time, we are inclined to think of a poisoned time. And yet the sources continue to gush and we believe time will be purified one day. I am a worshipper of flowing and would like to entrust my sins to the waters, let them be carried to the sea.’

Sometimes I think foreign visitors don’t take Ireland and its people serious, with all their trad sessions and leprechauns and failed banks and ghost estates sitting there at the fringe of Europe. Ireland never picked a fight with the whole world like the Germans did, but some of the people here cared enough about their country and its imaginary borders and imaginary religions that they killed each other with bombs and snipers and hunger strikes and shotguns again and again. And the walls they built in Belfast were as effective as the one in Berlin.

Here’s a fantastic animated version of Tom Waits’ ‘Starving In The Belly Of The Whale’ by Gal Shkedi. Happy Sunday oder so.

The good guys over at Spotted by Locals, the brilliant city guides with insider tips
by locals in 56 cities worldwide for which I write about Berlin, have asked me to give away five of their city apps for Android and I happily comply. Here’s how you can enter:

• Just leave a comment with your preferred city underneath this post. First come first served!

Disclaimer: you’ll need to purchase the app first and Spotted by Locals will refund you the full prize.

Good luck!

I’ve been trying to write about my time as active metal musician for ages, but have not found the right approach yet. Here’s a try/excerpt/whatever.

It’s 5 am. All lights off. It’s raining. Nothing has changed. The room seems dusty. I can’t sleep. I sleep. I dream.

Driving the Boulevard Peripherique in the dark, the motorway below and the lights above going clack clack clack. The sanity of the road, the car filled with instruments, amplifiers, dirty socks, empty beer bottles and the stinking and snoring of four horny men outside of time and reality. The joy of shouting obscenities at the top of my lungs at all the people standing in front of me and still they enjoy it. Snorting speed at the toilet of a massive concert hall right next to a disused steelworks where Simply Red played the day before and now I’m about to go on stage. The fascination of sweat, rhythm, aggression, all thrown into fifteen thirty sixty minutes on the wobbly stage of an alternative punk club, with two sixteen-year-olds and the sound engineer watchingus, the band that drove 200 kilometers to get there. The amazement of hearing a thousand people shout the name of the same band before you even start to play. The road the road the road. Too much and too little.

I don’t regret the time when you thought just of me. I don’t regret the time you drove me crazy.

Franz Reichelt, a strange man with an impressive Emperor Franz-Joseph-moustache, jumps from the Eiffel Tower wearing a self-made parachute that looks like a too-large leather duvet cover. The parachute does not open. After his death, spectators will measure the depth of the hole made by his impact: 15 centimetres.