Self-quarantine day 10. Me and two other neighbours ran into each other in our pyjamas down by the bins and stood in a broad triangle, laughing helplessly at ourselves as the grey sun struggled to come out overhead. In Berlin we have been indoors since early November. “Does my guitar playing bother you through the […]
My little Tisch is dying really fast. It seems her body is already cooling and her gait is all wobbly and drunk. Her kidneys are three-quarters shut down and the surfeit of unprocessed toxins has spaced out her brain. She’s in the netherworld. But she cuddles herself against me, and against him with whom she […]
I had a beautiful friendship once, with a woman who is also a writer. We read each other’s works in a kind of ecstasy of communion, making notes at every page. Our conversation was easy and delving, muscular and gracious, exploratory and frank. Then men who wore make up began appearing on the covers of […]
I still spend an hour every morning coughing earnestly and can’t laugh without coughing. I thought I was trapped for life. So I hear you and I just want to say: nicotine cravings last four minutes in the body. The rest is mindgame. If you can ‘delay, drink water, do something else’ for four minutes […]
A friend of mine took her own life, from herself and from the rest of us, a little while back, perhaps eighteen months. After a long time another of her friends whom I didn’t know wrote to me in Berlin saying she had left behind a painting for me. We met when he was in […]
On the one hand, consensual sex is nobody else’s business. On the other, I feel sad for this person (surely a woman). I feel suspicious of her dominant/exploiting partner (surely a man). Sexual play is one thing. But if she is dependent on it, I start to feel like there are healthier ways for people […]
The battle to take seriously my own life and prospects, and to treat myself well, is the great absorbing struggle of my life. After fifty or a hundred rapes, before which I had never kissed and been kissed; after being savagely beaten and thrashed by my parents one of whom is now dead for daring to […]