Below are the 20 most recent journal entries recorded in dada_sein's LiveJournal:

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Wednesday, April 9th, 2008
9:32 pm	masters of what?! Inside of me i'm aware of the mad rush, some sort of pulse that is trying to urge me on, and i'm doing my best to accept it. i keep telling myself, just 1000 more words, and then perhaps only 4000 more. i've left it all to the last second thinking i needed the stress of the very very close deadline to make these words spill out of me, but it has resulted in listening to songs way too loud and me lying on my newly empty living room floor analyzing the cracks of the ceiling i can't see with my bad eyesight. yikes. once again, the writing and the dreaming of writing has been etching lines under my eyes. they all tell me how exhausted i look, and i smile and nod, and try to remain someone/somewhat sane when i teach these last two classes, but i'm obviously not pulling it off. rounds and rounds of espresso and toast, and whisky when the coffee starts hurting my stomach. but then next week will be a pure one, with every hour of the day free for some mad research rush and frantic typing, and maybe ending with some ridiculous champagne that i can't afford but have been dreaming of: the gosset grande rose! cinnamon and raspberries and sweet blood. only one more week... and today i made the decision to accept a position in ontario, and the reality of that decision has added to the  panic. i'm writing about walls as skin and this has made me want to creep inside my own barriers and find my bachelardian nest. i will leave some quite new very good things behind, which have already been spoken of under thick white comforters and darkness. a silent sadness from now through the summer: without meeting my eyes, a twitch of shoulder blades, a spontaneous confession. my dream last night was one of old jealousy, i awoke thinking of green eyes. (2 Comments |Comment on this)
Sunday, July 8th, 2007
12:50 pm	i had this moment yesterday when the final sentence of the assignment i was writing came to me, like my brain had turned a sharp corner and was faced with a cement wall. strangely enough it was positive, the first time an essay of mine written in german had a somewhat interesting and i think well explained original point. we all know it is easy to write something long-ish because you have the time and space to explain something with many words, this seemed more powerful because it was a very short assignment, a concise smatter of words about graffiti as "protest" and celan's "spracheproblematik" with german and post-war identity blah blah blah: "Der Tod ist ein Meister aus Deutschland." and today the sun is shining and i have moved the laptop from the couch to the proper writing desk because i have to basically sit here for the next many hours fighting with my final paper. the first round! i was thinking it would be easier to re-work an old one of mine originally written in english and simply transform my ideas to german. the issue is the way i express myself in english and in german is entirely different and the normal structure of an essay in german is also another world to one written in english, so it has been tormenting me even though i really haven't started it yet. the 'starting' of a long assignment is always an internal thing, but this process of thinking has always been done in english for me and now i feel the real disappointment of my inability to do the same in german; the idea of switching/translating these thoughts has made me lie on my bed for most of the day already, staring at the clouds whipping across the sky, and opening and closing my windows to the crows and the wind. i have given up the idea that one day i will simply get it because i need the challenge. i like not knowing everything, i like calculating the possibilities of certain connotations of the words i use, i like putting in use small new words i have discovered, trying to slip them in seamlessly to the stories i try to drunkenly tell the other students in my class or quietly to myself before i fall asleep. and this is it. after i type these ten (?) pages i am finished for the summer, with time left over for sitting stress-free in the parks and making lines in small blank books that will connect eventually to each other. i will then be able to fill in my own blanks, and maybe reach out my small hand for the one you offered me the other night because it made me smile. (1 Comment |Comment on this)
Wednesday, June 6th, 2007
11:28 pm	the heat rises and falls, leaving evidence behind in my headaches. and i think it's only at night when i feel weird, when i have been left alone to stand wobbling on the tram all the way home, fighting my own thoughts. therefore the walk up the steps to my flat is always humbling. i keep marching upwards until i see the empty saucer placed in the corner of my floor, the dish belonging to the cat that roams the cold marble hallways who i haven't met yet. it's maybe five or six flights, four too many. but i have taken to running down them in the mornings, my music cranked and my falling-apart silver boots almost sliding down the slick steps without me with my school bag banging the banister, old receipts and gum wrappers snowing down the the floor where the men with the cables hang out, smoking those too cheap cigarettes and listening to me as i keep from barely falling downwards. then i leave the building to stand wobbling on the tram again, and i steady myself by holding onto the yellow bars because i can't hold onto you anymore and it's you i want to see in the mornings when everything seems new again. tell me you miss me again please. (9 Comments |Comment on this)
Friday, June 1st, 2007
1:23 am	when descending the steps into an u-bahn station the smell is amazing and sometimes quickly turns into that of freshly baked croissants, the mixture of gasoline and butter, anticipation. we went into the 'west' today, this term i find so funny. it was an opening for a young british performance artist whose name i didn't catch or whose performance i purposely missed to stand outside and sip a lukewarm beck's. have been fighting off a cold and have been taking some miracle homeopathic remedy which involves me placing ten drops of sugar water under my tongue every half an hour. this is at once annoying and delicious, but doing so makes me feel responsible somehow, like i have a purpose, a job to do. but after a few beers i immediately felt better and less despondent, which allowed me to chat with phillip for most of the night. the thirty degrees weather has been changed to temperatures in the early twenties and now i can close my windows to the traffic and the moths. late at night i still can't sleep though, flipping the channels of the german tv by my bed and watching dubbed american reality shows (miami ink?!) or those shows where girls who are "endlich achtzehn!" take their tops off. this is my last weekend of freedom before i take this insane intensive lit course, am a bit nervous about it. i hate being the new one, i hate situations where i don't know anyone and don't care to meet anyone. i come acoss as seeming snobby or lame but the fact of the matter is i have no interest in intense fake one-month friendships. am i getting older or more bitter? argh. tomorrow i will buy some books of lined paper to finish my short story on. am writing about klaus the alcoholic austrian aristocrat who sits in restaurants all day and night and lives in an empty apartment in kreuzberg and to whom everything is "absolutely outrageous!". last time we had dinner with him he quoted a tom waits song and since then i've been killing myself to remember that moment, that line, the way his tale dipped and folded around his lilting voice, his cigarette almost burning his middle two knuckles. (Comment on this)
Saturday, May 19th, 2007
6:04 pm	the berlin zoo is one of the oldest in germany and one of the most beautiful i have been to, the ancient trees and landscaped gardens where the animals try to live make it a not-so-sad zoo experience. except for the cat house, where ancient breeds of cats from the himalayas and other high mountain peaks paced back and forth, back and forth. the panther, jaguar and the tigers were the saddest. obviously insane, their eyes were trauma itself. but some just slept, including this desert sand cat lions, pandas, hippos, rhinos, monkeys, owls, flamingos, nasenbaers and the most popular baby polar bear in the world: Knut! with the creepiest trainer/mommy! hundreds of people were there to ooohhh and aaaahhh around knut... we spent the entire hot sunny day there, running after bella and chloe. one of the best parts of the afternoon was when bella chilled out and sat alone on the grass making daisy chains after we had sat under a willow tree eating french fries and watching gigantic carp blurp around a pond. sada and i then had ice cream and watched the girls try to climb into the flamingo pit. (3 Comments |Comment on this)
Monday, May 7th, 2007
6:56 pm	hamburg wiedergekehrt outside the window i hear the rattling of bicycles on the cobblestones as the still cigarette air adds to my sleepiness. it's strange being back here, i sit at the same cafes staring at the same trees while the same people avoid my eyes when i speak german. but it was this exact sameness that i missed, that i wanted to come back to, that followed me in my dreams and hopes and the small stories i told others or whispered to you as you snored beside me. the sun is gone today after seven glorious days of heat. daniel richter's show at the kunsthalle blew me away, hung out with sada and the dapper tal r for most of the night, ate dinner after the opening with some art collectors and two of the chicks on speed, the afterparty followed with tumblers of ridiculously strong gin and tonics that were slurped up because of the heat, the band was called 'three other beatles' ( '3 different beatles'?) and they dressed like harlon t. bobo...sigh! oh but it wasn't worth the hangover, or the phonecall from the front desk of the hotel telling me i missed checkout, or the insane charges on the phone in the room: aren't phones in hotels always free? or the hacking cough from all those marlboro reds that michael was feeding us around 4 am... tonight we walk down the street to see the black lips at the astra-stube, the tinyiest bestest place i can imagine for this show. i saw them play last year i think almost to this day, nika, tammo, brook and i showed up shining with beer and love and summer. again the repetition is encircling me with kierkegaard's cynicism. i should stop trying to resist it's embrace. (2 Comments |Comment on this)
Wednesday, June 14th, 2006
6:24 pm	meine letzter tag in hamburg... (3 Comments |Comment on this)
Tuesday, June 13th, 2006
2:17 pm	THE BLACK LIPS. officially the best live band in the world. for the first and last time i saw hamburgers truly freak out last night while the black lips played in the small oven-like room at the top of the squat on the river. sweat was flying, beer was being poured over the guitarist's head, shoes were stomped on, things were randomly thrown around, dancing sticky wet pulsing bodies were forever colliding, and the heat was so intense that during each song, despite the fact that they were maybe the BEST! SONGS! EVER!, i was looking forward to the end because then the room would get a bit breezy from all the clapping/yelling/fists-being-pumped-in-the-air for a small moment. THE BLACK LIPS! am effing deaf today. and now some current observations: current outside temperature: 28 degrees current suitcases packed: 0 current boxes on my floor that have to be sorted through: 4 current hearing loss: massive current number of corny bananen-schokolade granola bars eaten: 5 current mood: queasy sadness stress-stomach (Comment on this)
Monday, June 12th, 2006
3:13 pm	for my last friday night in hamburg we had a "grillparty" in the garden. this involved lots of rothaus pilsner, a few lecker mojitos that had our organic mint that grows on our balcony in them, and germany's best tofu wurst. it was a wonderful evening and we spent it lounging around and eating and laughing while the rest of germany sat in front of their tvs and watched the first game of the WELTMEISTERSCHAFT 2006 (world cup soccer) which, of course, germany is hosting. --------------------------------- --------------------------------- --------------------------------- hamburg has turned quite insane with all of the excitement of the WM. most cars have 2 german flags flying in the breeze on either side of the doors and people (mostly male football fans) are walking around in ridiculous flag skirts/dresses and red-black-and-yellow streaked faces and big top hats and megaphones that play "jingle bells." i hate it, this overnight patriotism! the people that live below me and nika are annoying us to no end with their wm bullshit... still counting down the days til i leave...there is now less than a handful left. now is the time i am supposed to be organizing everything and all i want to do is sit on my balcony and listen to ziggy stardust at my favorite deafening volume, counting the cars WITHOUT those damn germany flags, which are mostly taxis with unrecognizable flags. so ja, here's a cheers to procrastination and my last few ducksteins! (1 Comment |Comment on this)
Friday, June 2nd, 2006
11:14 pm	there is an abandoned amusement park on the outskirts of treptower park in east berlin. it has sat empty of loud crowds and clowns and popcorn smells for over three years. to get into it, all you have to do is hop the fence and try to stay away from the caretaker who lives alone in the "wild western town" part of the park. and when he finds you, it is best to pretend you don't speak german and you don't have a camera and when he makes you climb back over the fence you hopped over to get in, even though he has the keys to the padlock on the fence jangling on a belt around his waist, you grin and bear it. (2 Comments |Comment on this)
Wednesday, May 31st, 2006
12:09 pm	houseguests can be good. especially when everybody can laugh together and shop together and when everybody likes "bowl coffees," which are basically cafe au laits in gigantic bowls that after drinking one you reflect on exactly when in your life you have drunk such a big milky delicious coffee...had ted and my sister staying with me while my parents stayed in a hotel in the schanzenviertel. it was a great week, but exhausting. it didn't help that it rained with a bitter, bitter oceany wind that never seemed to stop interspersed with hot muggy grey grey still air and flashes of intense sun that mocked us as we were wrapped up in scarves and toques and long socks. i really loved showing off this amazing city and dining in crazy german restaurants every night and the generosity of my parents and dear schwester was amazing! felt special and loved. we had some fun random times... erika and i found the FC ST. PAULI fan shop which was basically an old graffitied shack on the edge of the playing field and bought some delectable things. hamburg's st. pauli soccer team is like the punkrockest soccer team ever, with the fans all being grizzly old punks that strut around town wearing their black hoodies with the skull and crossbones motif with old jeans, a jean jacket, a black toque, and a bottle of astra in their hand. this team is extremely leftist and is notorious for once beating bayern-munich in an exposition game, when bayern-munich was the best team in germany and st. pauli one of the worst (they are in a seperate league). they are still so proud of this feat that much of the gear in the shop was t-shirts with the famous 2 - 1 score silkscreened on them. even though i have never been to a game and always wanted to but never got around to and now i am leaving in two weeks and the season is over (i think?), this team feels super close to my heart as i live basically in st. pauli. i am a proud st. pauli girl! ted, erika, nika and i saw "viva l'american death ray music" play at an insane bar off the reeperbahn that is as big (as small?) as my bedroom on the friday night they were here. this show BLEW US AWAY. my god! i saw them play once with josh at the 3B tavern in bellingham years ago and they did not disappoint. that band is one of the best ever, and we were squished so close to them while they were playing that basically the bass player kept almost hitting erika and i, which we definitely did NOT mind. he wore a starched white shirt and grey suit and was electrifyingly hot, and kept asking nika to translate things he was saying into the mike and it was cool. VIVA! the singer also charmed us with his gynormous silver wishbone that he wore around his neck, his vampire-ish teeth and his banana belt buckle. seriously krank, man. so i had my official last day of work today, and it feels great. i am free! when i showed up yesterday, my mentorin was like, "oh, you still work here?" so that shows that yeah, i will be extremely missed. i am ecstatic to be done with that school! i will never, ever teach english again. ever. i have 15 days left in this city and my stomach feels empty and strange when i think about it. of course i am excited to be home again but i'm not too sure if i am ready for it. i have said my goodbyes to berlin but don't know how to do the same to hamburg. i remember watching amber walk alone down grindel allee on her last night here in december and thought, shit, that will be me in a few months. it was a beautiful and quietly cold night and that walk home beside the towering kastanien trees and the columned buildings of the university was for her the actual start of the end. her little steps seemed to get shorter and slower as the walk went on and then i hopped into the s-bahn and before i knew it she suddenly disappeared out of my sight. i want my goodbye to be as simple and as beautiful as that. (7 Comments |Comment on this)
Thursday, May 18th, 2006
3:19 pm	the golden pudel is a tiny bar on st.pauli hafenstrasse that faces the harbour. it is covered in graffiti, posters, drawings, and random boards nailed across random walls and it is usually open during insane hours when nothing else is open and is often rockin' with a weird scene of people inside and outside drinking beer on the rotten wooden picnic tables that sit in front of it. there is a white room inside the pudel that is kinda an art gallery and is the size of a large closet. i sat in here on tuesday night with brook, tammo, ariel pink and his girlfriend geneva and sipped beck's for two and a half hours. they were supposed to start playing at ten, so we got there at the appropriate time but ended up laughing with them for, god, i guess until well after midnight? in fact, i drank so many beers during our bizarre conversations about teaching highschool, l.a., hamburg, and germans in general that when they got up to play in the main room the world was spinning and i had to duck out after three songs. feel annoyed at myself for this. half a bag of haribo gummibears and a corny granola bar for dinner followed by 5 beers= missing amazing music show in the sickest venue for that kind of music after becoming fast friends with two of the coolest kids i have met in a long time. bleh. and my camera ain't working! what gives? (Comment on this)
Tuesday, May 16th, 2006
12:04 am	here's to frozen french fries, bourbon bourbon bourbon, meeting (dare i say briefly chilling with) pete doherty, seeing a wild ferret on the reeperbahn, ariel pink playing at the golden pudel tomorrow, my last week of work, vanilla scented candles, and secret sweeeeeeeeeeeet surprises... Current Music: freiwillige selbstkontrolle (Comment on this)
Sunday, May 7th, 2006
7:33 pm	nika and i had our own demo on may first on our balcony. she painted an old bedsheet so it said, in red and green letters, BRING DA MUTHAFUCKN RUCKUS. this we hung off the balcony until the old ladies in our apartment complex kept coming by and complaining to us as we sat on the balcony drinking beer and laughing at them (we are mean, but they are crazy). after all, it was may first! so then nika had a great idea...she took down the sign, turned it over, and it became this. this is nika dressed as hitler on our balcony... -------------------------------------- oh, "OMAS SIND SUESS" means "grandmas are sweet." we also changed the painting of herr hellmund (which was too visible from the street and made me feel like crazy sometimes) into this new relaxing paradise. man, i seriously haven't really left the balcony for the past three days. it has been unglaubliche sunny and 23 degrees. i drown out the traffic sounds on max-brauer-allee by blasting music out into the world, loudly chewing pasta salad with olives, tomatoes, olive oil and a smattering of schafskaese, and knocking over empty beer bottles with my feet. -------------------------------------- (6 Comments |Comment on this)
Sunday, April 30th, 2006
2:52 pm	nika and i have been cohabiting for i guess a month now. this involves lots of green olives, watching helge schneider movies, random bottles of sekt at inappropriate times, tomato and bocconcini salad breakfasts, and of course, the HERR HELLMUND OBSESSION. our balcony has become the living room as spring slowly washes over hamburg, and we are out there often eating breakfast and sipping wernesgruener. last weekend on my way to brunch i spied the perfect sofa that our balcony needed, and alan and tammo helped me carry it back to my place. when we reached the busy busy holstenstrasse, we took a break and set it down on the concrete between the long crosswalk and just sat and chilled there for about fifteen minutes, cars swerving around us and honking and us just feeling really cool sitting on an old sofa in the centre of traffic. ruled. last weekend nika also had the urge to decorate the wood seperating our balcony from the neighbours. so here is herr hellmund, for all the world to see: other highlights of the week were definitely the black mountain/ pink mountaintops show, in which i rocked it out vancouver style with the boys, went to a crazy bar with the band and ended the night eating falafels on the steps of the squat in the schanzenviertel at 4:30 am laughing so hard i was crying. alan was here for a while and we hung out in parks near the harbour, lying in the grass, drawing pictures, and contemplating ends and beginnings. i'll miss him alot. also went to the after party of the opening of jonathan meese's show, which was a bit 'meh,' but it was open bar and the dj was playing some weird german punk like "ideal" and we started a dance-dance-party until the cops shut it down. and johnny said to me, "hellooooooooo again ingeeeeeeeeeeeeeee!" have been collecting mad articles about him and had a nice chat when he showed up six hours late to his own party... love that guy! and tomorrow is may 1st, the KAMPFTAG DER ARBEITKLASSE. demonstrations and riots are supposed to pop up around the city, causing chaos and broken beer bottles everywhere. workers against kapitalismus! against der polizei! tammo found an amazing poster for me which says: Sagt NEIN zu Deutschland bevor es andere tun! und so ja, ich denke, dass ich morgen auch kampfen werde... (Comment on this)
Tuesday, April 18th, 2006
6:51 pm	i celebrated easter by seeing black dice at the squat on the river. it was the second time i have seen them play, and they blew my mind once again. i LOVE them! their set this time was less fuzz-distortion and squawks, and more swooning tribal click-bleeps and of course a bass so bad that the crowd was just silently pulsing...the night proceeded in odd ways, we went to an indie-rock karaoke party that bit, so full of lame scenesters and dyed black hair that i was amazed and repulsed, (so unlike last week's insanely wicked karaoke party in yet another squat where nika, raybanned brook and i sung 'the house of the rising sun' and stole the show) so we drowned our disgust in whiskey and jaegermeister and then the boys ate some currywurst and we hit the bars on hamburger berg, drinking semi-free beer as tammo knows about every single bartender in every bar on that strip. they were spinning a bit o' grime at rosi's and so we stayed there for a good while until we got kicked out and just skipped around to all the other weird joints on that mini-street. i'm still awed by how it happened, but after dancing to james brown and pearl jam (i know) while guzzling beer like i really never have before, we emerged on the street to find it was sunny and gorgeous, the magpies were singing and it turned out to be 6:30 am... these crazy endless nights keep happening to me! am loving it...and the best is coming home and drinking green tea in the sun on our balcony in our mutually-confused states, making up stories of my tiny german village in the winter moss of the old flower box that nika has now planted wildflower seeds in and making plans for the rest of the day that end up fading away to afternoon naps and strolls to the river and discussions of hall and oates' lyrics. ------------------------ i have also been hanging out at the deichtorhallen where sada etc. are setting up jonathan meese's retrospective, called MAMA JOHNNY. have kinda decided to write about him next year during my master's programme and am super excited about it and johnny seems into it. his use of words is totally hilarious and insane and german and i have secretly maybe kinda fallen in love with him. when we have met, only two times before, he shook my hand for maybe four minutes straight while grinning at me in his insane way and crazily enough in some photos he looks a tad like a certain painter some of us know: --------------------------------------- Current Music: pavement (2 Comments |Comment on this)
Wednesday, April 12th, 2006
6:43 pm	last night i went alone to see alban berg´s "wozzeck," which is basically the most fucked up opera of all time, based on one of the most fucked up plays of all time called "woyzeck" by georg büchner, which was made into another fucked up movie by herzog starring klaus kinski in the late 70s. here are some highlights of last night's performance: i saw a guy,s dong i saw a guy hump another man,s leg like a dog i saw a guy wank off throughout the performance thousands and thousands of 100 euro notes kept raining down on the stage the set was a huge white cube that had the aura of a james turrel piece (specifically referring to the blue room in the seattle art museum where youz had to take off your shoes and put those little operation booties on over your socks before you entered the room, only to discover it wasn,t a room after all, it was...paradise) a duet was sung through old mics and blasted out of an old amp on stage that had crazy fuzz-distortion drones and atonalities: the word BLOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOT! being sung over and over and over til i felt like i could die (means ,blood,) also FLOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOT! (flood) WOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOT! (courage) ROOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOF! (reputation) it was all in german, and barely sung (more like a spoken/shouted opera) hands would reach out from the stage and grab the money and often the only sounds you would hear would be an insanely long bassoon note and the sounds of crumpling money echoing throughout the opera house i sat in a box seat obscenely close with only 3 other people children came on stage and destroyed lots of white chairs and music stands the stage/white cube opened at the end and a terrible curry yellow light was thrown on everything and the cast exited the stage and then they played the last scene of the opera, which was pre-recorded, through the fuzzy speakers, way too loud to this empty yellow stage... i'm actually STILL in a state of confusuion over it all... on a side note i have been hanging out at an art space that was just opened in the first floor of an abandoned department store five minutes from my place that has the unfortunate name of DINGDONG. it has an amazing bar and the whole floor is covered with some of the best installation art i have seen in years. we have been sitting on sofas there and dancing to elektro music and listening to some boys playing their guitars and sipping beer from the baltic and petting three-legged dogs and stumbling home too late. nika the roomie is one of the best partnerin's in crime i have found in years, she perhaps fills in the pwastika's-in-montreal hole in my party heart... but perhaps tonight i will sleep a full night, perhaps. (6 Comments |Comment on this)
Saturday, April 8th, 2006
6:57 pm	in the pouring rain today nika and i took six "kisten" (crates) of empty beer bottles to the toom markt to get some money for a new kiste of beer. each crate contained 30 empty bottles, and so this means we strolled down max-brauer-allee in totally inappropriate clothing, me armed with my stolen shopping cart from aldi that held three kisten rattling and shaking over the uneven fussgaengerweg and she in a mini skirt and three kisten balanced on a wheelbarrow we stole from herr hellmund, with close to 200 empties... the people that crossed our path didn't even blink an eye at us, nor did the guys working at the bottle returning place, us completely soaked and giggling while chaotically steering an effing muddy wheelbarrow filled with 90 empty beer bottles through the aisles... and now the newly acquired beer is chilling in the small fridge and the plans for tonight have been made and it has turned out to actually be pay day and i finally am able to buy groceries and i'm getting thirsty already. (Comment on this)
Monday, April 3rd, 2006
7:32 pm	have decided to put my comic on a seperate livejournal journal. if you read it and like it, please go to comicing... Current Music: the beans, 'crane wars' (Comment on this)
Saturday, April 1st, 2006
7:09 pm	herr hellmund strikes again.... the hausmeister of my building is named herr hellmund. he is tall, muscled, wears neat (as in tidy) button-down shirts with the sleeves rolled up to his elbows, wears a tool belt full of practical jangling tools, has frizzy greying hair, stinks like schnapps and has the sad broken blood vesseled nose of most german alcoholics. he freaks the shit outta me. he is known in my building as being a gross lecherous drunk and has done too many weird things to too many occupants of my building that i don't even wanna get into it. he once came into my flat to fix my radiator and stayed way too long, telling drunken story after drunken story to a very uncomfortable me who avoided asking him to come in and fix my radiator for months in the first place and suffered silently in my frozen german emptiness until i just couldn't any longer. my doorbell has been ringing early in the morning and i never answer the door. running into brook the other day, who also lives in my building and also tries to avoid the wrath of herr hellmund, i learned that the electricity bill that i thought was included in my rent ISN'T, and now hellmund is on the warpath and is trying to collect money to pay the electricity bill, which in his case is ONE HUNDRED AND NINETY EUROS, and in my case will likely be more like seven gazillion canadian dollars, since i have lived here for going on 8 monats. SO i think these early-morning-doorbell-ringings are evil herr hellmund trying to collect! at it will be before he has numbed himself to the world by drinking schnapps! and i have 72 cents in my bank account! i will have to adopt a disguise... herr hellmund also (we so don't know how he actually did this and just love picturing him doing it) strung christmas lights around the gynormous evergreen tree in the centre of the garden in december, the lights circled around and around until they reached the very tall top. the idea of him on a ladder! drunk and reeling! ------------------------- (Comment on this)