I was picked up by Axle in a twenty year old Volkswagen bug. The kilometerometer, or whatever it might be called in english, had been around two or three times. He was a friendly english major with a great collection of lyrical modern music on cassette. He was not a major in the english army, he was a student majoring in english. He was grateful to have someone to talk to in english. He had been to Britain but oddly he had an Australian accent. His friends and colleagues in Britain had been Australian.

At the border I was told that I must buy a transit visa to get through east Germany. We went to the booth that sold them and found a sign that said "Bitte Warten." We warted for fifteen minutes before the little man came to snatch my money and give me a piece of paper that would allow me to travel through East Germany as long as I did not stop anywhere and went directly to Berlin on what was fortunately a western built highway. We returned and presented our passports again, mine now with the appropriate slip of paper. The customs officer thanked us very much for our passports and told us to drive on...

"Wait one cotton pick'n minute! I want my passport back before we go anywhere!" Axle told me to shut up and we drove to part two of the East German border. I was livid because I did not know that part one sends the passports to part two by way of outdoor covered conveyor belt for computer inspection while the cars cue. Confused? I was too. I am glad my passport did not get stuck half way.

The countryside on the east side was much nicer than that on the west. Tree plantations were growing, Cabbages ranged from deep purple to light blue. Mature forest stood undamaged. There were very few distractions such as the pylons, billboards, and crossing highways that were so frequent in the west.

Out of this medieval countryside loomed, for a distance on the right side of the road, a small industrial city made entirely of smokestacks, pipes, piles of god knows what and a few decaying high rises. I have no idea what they were doing because there were no names, logos, or words on any of the buildings. It looked like what I imagined Sudbury might look like. I felt badly for the inhabitants of such a mess.

Getting into west Berlin was fast and easy though I did see a couple of cars being ransacked at the side as the glum owners stood and watched.

I told Axle where I was going and he told me that there was no way I could find it on my own and so he was good enough to drive me to 52 Neue Hostr which was supposed to be the address of my good friend Boris and her boyfriend Oliver.

The huge wooden front doors were locked. The building was five stories high and was connected to all the other five or six story buildings on its block so I could not walk around to check the back. The annoying european system of having the buzzers on the inside of the locked door put me in an impossible position. Boris and Oli had no phone. It got later and later and the lights in the building became fewer and fewer. I had given up yelling and coo-cooing and was about to find shelter to camp under when the hall light went on. Whoever was leaving would have to open the door. Either through politeness or if necessary at knife point I could scam my way into the building and somehow figure out which was their apartment, or at the very least have somewhere dry to sleep. As it turned out neither politeness or my swiss army knife were necessary. I was attacked by a screaming Boris and a hearty Oliver smile.

B E R L I N

Everyone was noticing that it was fall again already. I think the seasons are a bit too repetitive for my liking. I think that it would be a good thing if "they" were to come up with a fifth; something completely different. It was fall and I was in Berlin where the number of seasons had been reduced to three for lack of a summer.

I had been keeping busy here at Borislava and Oliver's place. Their whole apartment resembled the desk I wrote at; from a description of the desk you may extrapolate to envision the apartment. Immediately in front of me was the solid and obsolete Adler with its frayed ribbon and badly chipped finish. Some of the keys on german typewriters are reversed; this strained my feeble powers of concentration. I had bought the machine for thirty five marks at one of the massive rummage sales that Berlin is famous for. Thirty five marks was nothing really but for me there without an income and living on credit it was a small fortune. I had bought the typewriter to replace Oliver's that I had broken, tried to repair, and had broken worse. It replaces its predecessor down to the model number, year, and colour; Oliver's aunt will never know that it is not the one that she gave him. Behind the Adler was the Singer which is one of the most ancient machines ever to be mass produced and it will never be obsolete. Its finish was perfect right down to the grovie little Osram bulb holder and automatic bobbin winder. Its cords were wrapped around everything on the desk and the little "gas" pedal was hanging on its cord over the edge of the desk like a pendulum. When I squeezed the trigger a wonderful noise came from behind the bright gold "Singer" letters, and the machine started to sew at the air. There was a full bottle of Berliner Luft pfefferminzlikor that had been opened but was untouched. It smelled like candy canes and would most likely make one just as sick. There was a little squat square bottle of ausziehtusche sepia that Boris had bought in East Berlin along with a number of other inks, papers, and god knows what else for next to nothing; art supplies are very cheap over there if you can find the ones you want. There were two piles of german books that normally supported a thick plate of glass that I had attempted to do drafting on and Oli had attempted to draw animation on when the typewriter was not there. The glass was on the floor amongst a lot of other junk where the typewriter had been. There was a thing of machine oil, a pile of photographs and newspaper clippings, two cigar boxes full of odd buttons, a number of plant cuttings rooting in a couple of glasses of water, pen nibs soaking in a jar of water, my zoom lens, a creatively made multi compartment pen organizer which was empty save one pair of scissors... There were three desk lamps, one was a self standing utilitarian 1920's type desk lamp with a 25W bulb for when we just wanted to see and that is all, another is the clamp on variety from the same period that had one of those nifty gumby bendy coil pipes that you can bend into any shape Henry Moore could imagine, and the third is Oli's own design. Oli's lamp was a beautiful contraption with a halogen bulb that did not work at all until I bought him the appropriate transformer from a rummage sale for 2.50 DM. Now it works but for all the ingenuity that went into it would be a lie if I were to say that it is practical. There was something made of enameled metal and I could not figure out what it was, a triangular piece of plastic I had used for drafting that possessed all the secrets of modern euclidian geometry, an ugly brass candle holder still full of the depressing remains of what once was a proud red candle holder with a half burnt blue candle, a small stuffed bear wearing a Santa Clause hat, a german guide to Berlin's 750th birthday celebrations, a roll of masking tape... And the fourth lamp that I had not seen for all the other stuff, it was basically a socket and bulb that I had put under the glass plate to illuminate my drafting from behind. There was a bolt on pencil sharpener, the european equivalent of an octopus plug that looked more like a muffin tin because of the shapes of the sockets there, a pile of typing paper, a pen, a roll of toilet paper, a transparent plastic globe that Boris bought her underwear in, and a heap of black cotton that Oliver was in the process of turning into something.

It was a small desk.

The rest of the two rooms were just as crowded, Photographs taken by Boris and Oli, paintings painted by them, pictures of them, paintings of them by each other, more lamps, spices, records, books, books, and more books, shelves and shelves of clippings and inks and sprays, and literally a bucket full of marker pens most of which did not work, two guitars, photography equipment and outdated chemicals, a stereo, a TV, a tiled cooking stove and a tiled heating stove both of which were huge and had been dead for years.

I had been reading.

I had heard rumors that Heart of Darkness is considered a pro communist book but I do not see that. I enjoyed having had a share in the experiences that were described so realistically that I could feel how dreamlike they were, and how horrible we are.

The Autobiography of Alice B. Toklas by Gertrude Stein has greatly afflicted my feelings toward communication. Stein had the propensity to slow thought down to the point of being palatable as text. I feel that writing has a lot to do with thinking and that it has a lot to gain from Gertrude's boldness. The digressions and run ons that I had lost marks for in grade school has caused her great fame, and rightly so. More often than not I think in digressions and run ons. I think it a wholesome and worthwhile skill to be able to communicate with them. At the very least the attempt exercises my feeble powers of concentration.

War and Peace is a grizzly Dallas that does not spare its audience the complexities of real social living. Like Dallas, nobody ever has to go to the bathroom and there is always some crisis or other to push the thing on. I think I picked it up and started to read it again every once and a while for the same reason most people turn on their TVs. What does Anna Mihalovna have up her sleeve? Why is Pierre such a goof? Is Prince Vasili going to get his charming Bolkonsky? Will Prince Nickolai Andreyevich Bolkinsky consent? Is count Bezuhov ever going to croak? Who is going to get his money. I bet Anna will arrange it so that Pierre gets it. Twenty pages later that is exactly what happened. I put it down for the same reason most people turn off their TVs. For $9.95 it was cheaper than a TV.

Sartre had some interesting realizations that have always been obvious to me such that I wonder how he could have gotten famous for writing them. They are things I had deduced for myself at an early age and have since taken for granted. He wrote on, though, beyond existentialism, into such areas as freedom. Although he may have observed these areas from the point of view of an existentialist, they are not existentialism. He lumped it all together and called it all existentialism but it is not. He is willing to say I think therefore I am but I do not think he could really grasp the idea that he did not, indeed he could not, KNOW anything else. I much prefer the axiom I thought up as a child "All I know for sure is that I am thinking." It may not leave a philosopher anything on which to build or give a person anything to act on but it certainly is true. I can not imagine how anybody, including Sartre, could KNOW anything more. Why can philosophers not admit that beyond their knowledge of their personal existence, all other "knowledge" is speculation, assumption, often taken for granted, supposed but not proved. We can only hope that our sense of logic and our five senses are not too far askew so that we can hope that our assumptions may have some bearing on what we call reality or the universe. Enough about existentialism, I am starting to make assumptions myself. All I know for sure is that I am thinking and that is that.

It was in Berlin that I decided that I would be very serious about learning french because I had learned to love the language whilst in France. I wish I could have spent all that time I wasted in french classes as a child doing something else. I did not like french then. Nobody understood that it was a waste of time and that I would be better off learning it later after I did like it. At SEED Alternative school in Toronto I learned that I do not have time to learn anything I do not want to learn. If I learn something I probably really want to know it and there is a lot that I really want to know so why waste time trying to squeeze in the things that I have no particular desire to know? I figured that I would take lessons and watch lots of french TV back in Toronto. I have never been a big TV person but TV is the best way to learn a language. Tiny children in the Netherlands watch lots of English and American TV and they all run around speaking english fluently and with an american accent. I never did take lessons but I have been watching french TV and it works.

It was also in Berlin that I decided that if I was going to be doing something boring to make money I might as well paid well for my time. On my return, I did get a very boring job that was very well paid at the Royal Bank.

I had been taking photographs. I have long chains of photographs of the wall that fit together. I had taken them in Kreuzberg where the wall is most interesting because of the graffiti there. One could glue them on the baseboards all around their house, or all around the tops of the walls to clean up that place where the bad wallpaper job sort of meets the ceiling. People there refer to the wall the way anybody would refer to any natural geographical feature. Perhaps only the older people refer to it with bitterness. 1961 was a long time before 1987 when I was in Berlin. Twenty six years is a very long time, especially now in the late 20th Century that time is measured in microseconds and there are five billion people to witness each one. The young people had grown up with the wall as a simple fact of Berlin just like in Toronto we all grow up knowing that you can not walk much farther south than Queen's Quay and that the subway only goes to Union station and then it has to turn around. I went spray painting on the wall. I wished that I could have afforded a few crates of spray paint. It is wonderful stuff and the wall is so high, permanent, flat and visible.

Kreuzburg could be considered the sub-culture district of Berlin. Boris and Oli and I explored what was left of a building that had been squatted. It seemed to us that it would take a lot of work to make such a mess. There was trash everywhere, big trash too like dead TVs , electric ovens, furniture, all smashed up and much of it was beyond recognition and all the windows were well smashed. In one room we saw footsteps coming form a smashed window. The footsteps seemed to have been made by somebody who had stepped in crusty rust coloured paint. They stumbled and staggered to the other side of the room where there was a lot of rust coloured paint splashed all around, then they continued about five feet to were there was even more, yes, dried up blood, everywhere and soaked up into a pillow. On our way down the stairs we heard people coming up and we did not know what to do so we stopped and fell silent and looked at one another in horror. The people we heard had stopped too as though they were planning some kind of murder under their breaths. Although they were a couple of landings below us, I could clearly imagine their snarling insane eyes looking up past their scarred and tattooed foreheads to were we were. There was only one way to go: down. Down we went only to find some very frightened students with their cameras and tripods. The relief was so overwhelming that nobody could even manage to laugh.

I had been exploring on my own while Boris and Oliver were at work. They were doing contour drawing for an animation firm. I bought an 8 DM pas that let me zoom around on the subway and S-bahn (sur-way) for 24 hrs so that I could get a feel for the city. A tourist asked me where the downtown was and I could not tell them because there was no answer. "Whatcha wanna do? Shop? Row? Walk? Squat? Skate? Fly? Drink?" One can do all of the above mentioned but not downtown because there is no downtown. Downtown Berlin was once as extravagant as Paris', but it was bombed to oblivion, bulldozed into little hills of rubble where weeds grow and then they built a wall thorough it. What was downtown Berlin is now the weedy outskirts of two heartless metropolitan entities.

I found a large building in Kreuzburg where, it turned out, I lived for a month. Walking south from Checkpoint Charlie I came across a weedy and garbage strewn field in which there was this exotic building standing defiantly all alone . It was strange that it had avoided the bombs and bulldozers. What was even more strange was the way that it had been completely covered with elaborate psychedelic murals. I walked past the smashed up Volkswagens which were covered with the ends of all the colours that were used on the building and had a collection of long metal rods sticking out of them. I walked past a couple in torn leather and green hair having a picnic of cheese sandwiches, apples, and beer. I walked towards the music coming from the room that later became the cafe. A number of extraordinary looking people and a dog were hard at work fixing the place up for the three day party that was to happen. Andy, the guy who designed the murals, told me to come to the house meeting to the following wednesday.

The house meeting was like a SEED Alternative school general meeting. It dragged on the same way and the decibel level rose in the same way and peoples faces contorted the same way and I am sure that very little was decided. The people who live in that building look like they would fit in just fine at SEED and likewise SEED students would fit in fine there. It is a big, german, live in SEED. There are two bands and they had a large basement room each. It sounds great in the office when both bands are practicing and the Beasty Boys are on the Beat box.

It is called the Tommy Weisbecker Haus. Tommy Weisbecker was a young lad at a demonstration who had been shot dead by a Berlin policeman. The police in Berlin are as notorious as division 52 in Toronto. When Ronald Reagan came to town all of Kreuzburg was cordoned off and nobody was allowed to leave. They were afraid that there might be a demonstration. And a demonstration there was. A lot of corporate property was damaged but nobody was far as I know was hurt.

Friday was the first day of DAS FEST der tanzenden RATTEN, in english - Ratfest, so thursday was the big clean up day. We took all the garbage that could burn and put it in a huge pile in the middle of the field and touched it. All the nonflammable things went into the huge roll around bins that I rolled out to the road to be picked up. The bins achieved tremendous momentums and were hard to stop once they were going so I had to be careful.

The bands were practicing, people were out doing last minute postering, buying liquor and beer to sell, and doing one another's hair. One older guy with an ugly face and hippie clothes which he never washed helped out a lot but he was forever yelling at people. He yelled at me once but that was his problem and besides, I could not understand german no matter how loud he yelled. We all ignored him as much as possible. He was possibly serving the purpose of being an example of how we did not want to turn out, and in fact of what we and other people throughout history had rejected. If rejective were an adjective, he would be the definition. "It is sad but I have not pity, after all he was rejective."

I made a lousy socialite there at first. I can talk in english to people one at a time and only slowly. I went to the Ratfest on friday night with Boris, showing up american style at about ten thirty or eleven and expecting things to be starting. The bands had already happened and nobody was sober enough to speak english (all the TV there Berlin was dubbed into german) so I went earlier on saturday and had a fabulous time. Boris and I were looking around at all the people and we were bursting with curiosity. What does he do? What does she do I wonder? There were many interesting looking people.

Borislava's mother had sent us a couple of Now Magazines from Toronto. It seemed to me that things were really happening in Toronto what with Nina Hagen at the Concert Hall, Carabana going on, and Veroshi Fame at Sluts and Dolts. Easels on sale at Grafix for $20.25. Billy Bragg goes to Nicaragua, Micha goes to Lee's Palace, Deja Voodoo and Change of heart to RPM with Psychedelic mondays still going strong. Cordless phones for $89. Fouton beds for $300. Prices still rising in Cabbagetown. I caught the last School is Hell cartoon and it caught me. But not all the news was good; Gordon Jocelyn's son Tim Jocelyn had died of AIDS and for all of Toronto's wealth nothing could be done. But on with the theatre and dance and manufacturing and films and exhibitions and shopping and concerts and clubs because Toronto is not going to stop for anything until every Canadian tree is cut, every drop of Canadian oil gone, and every bit of Canadian soil eroded. This could take hundreds of years. I knew that Toronto would be here when I returned that October. Even though Tim is dead.

I did not see anything about one of my favorite bands, Neon Rome. I was worried that they might be history which would have made me upset. I do not care who thinks they are stupid because I do not care if they are. I remain faithful.

I pictured Karl in Toronto playing his sax.

I hoped that back in Toronto all my friends were being themselves. I hoped that Michael would be industrious, Julian would be cool, Anita would be at a party and that Christine and Erin would be painting up a storm. I hoped that everyone would be settling down together with the VCR, talking on the cordless phone, redecorating, and playing music. I hoped that Lisa would be happy at home.

Does all this sound like I was a little home sick? Perhaps I was but I am missing Berlin now. I felt a little more at home every day I was there. I did not pay for the tube; I took my chances like everyone else did. I could spray paint there just like at home and I did. What I missed most about Toronto was not having things at my disposal; things like jobs, schools, big english libraries, Riverdale farm, my fridge, my bicycle and as Virginia Wolff would say "A room of one's own." I think that worst of all I missed Karl. Ironically I had left Toronto partly to see if it would put an end to my unsurpassable and unreturned love for him. I know now that nothing short of death could do that.

It was morning at Boris and Oliver's and simple minds were cutting through the air and I swear that I could see every blade of grass in the park through the trees. It was overcast and just a little misty which is softening everything; even the wall looks peaceful and the guards look pleasant.

The autobiography of Alice B Toklas was sitting like any other object on the kitchen table. If the spirit of Gertrude Stein was in that book I am sure that she was itching to tell me more but I was ignoring her for a while to write.

The morning made even the messiest corners of the apartment look as though everything had been carefully placed, like some kind of complicated stage set that is carefully described by the playwright and painstakingly executed down to the tiniest speck of dust. Everything seemed very clear, as though it could all be reduced to binary. For me, times like that are special because my powers of objective thinking and concentration are at their best. Nothing had any meaning or purpose; it just was what it was. I do have goals of my own so that mental state can not last forever.

The spell went as had the mist. If I were to stay like that for too long I wonder if I could get stuck. I do not think that I could live very long like that because life itself would have no meaning. Perhaps people would stick me in a hospital and feed me intravenously so that I could stand for the rest of my life with the same blank expression on my face, possibly seeing everything more clearly than anyone else has in the entire history of humanity. Everyone else would be obsessed with THEIR lives and THEIR thoughts and THEIR goals and I would have none of these things and everything would just be what it is and happen the way that it does. People would call me insane but actually I would be hyper-sane because I would have lost MY mind.

I am glad that I can think subjectively, I am glad I have my goals. The only reason for this and indeed the only reason I could be glad for anything is because I have goals. It is a circular argument! Can you imagine? All of humanity is based on a circular argument. We want things because we want to want things and we want to want things because we want things. We call this argument sanity. Perhaps Andy Warhol was correct when said, "it all comes down to chemicals."

Hello? Hello? Have I lost you?

I wrote a letter to Khristine, she is a good friend of mine and a Toronto artist. It went as follows: "Christine, hello, how are things? You may answer when I return because it is futile to try to be with a person by merely sending them a letter. Answer me with a painting." This January I received a painting from Christine for my birthday.

I saw a high definition television at the Berlin science centre. The difference between it and regular television is like the difference between wearing your contacts and wearing blinkers. As soon as an HDTV system becomes affordable everyone will have them. I could see the fizz over the champagne glass, every hair on a cat, every letter of typewritten test, even the unintentional dirt under peoples fingernails that was not supposed to be part of the show. It is more like film than regular old lousy definition TV except that it is more real and electronic than picturesque celluloid.

It was the last night of the ratfest. There were four big fires in the field that people sat around. There was a singer in a band who could sing like Nina Hagen except that he was a man. There was a primitive jungle performance in the basement.

There were videos being screened in the long assembly room. One was documenting when the children's farm in Kreuzburg was destroyed by developers and about the protests and violence that broke loose. Another documenting the protests and violence when Kreuzburg was isolated by the police because Ronald Reagan was in town.

There were a lot of beer cans and bottle strewn about because they are non returnable, the field is covered with them. I got drunk on Vodka because it is very cheap; bought no doubt in east Berlin.

Most of the bands managed to sing in english but only a few people actually spoke it. I found three people who could, one was too drunk to talk to, another was too stoned to talk to, and the third was a downright unpleasant englishman. My best conversation was with Damian, the singer who can sing like Nina Hagen; we laughed a lot and did not say very much. I tried to talk to a dog but it could not speak english either.

I spent most of the evening standing around and absorbing the ambience. The whole thing was very real and I was impressed by the solidarity and the full moon, the fires and the music.

The following morning Gertrude Stein was screaming at me from Boris and Oliver's kitchen table where I had left her, she positively had to tell me the rest of her story so I sat down with her to listen. Oliver had picked all the stuff off of the apartment floor, and had vacuumed. It was actually possible to see that the colour of the carpet was green. In all of his enthusiasm he had put everything on, you guessed it, the desk. I barely had room to return the carriage whilst witting.

I sat, listening to Avalon by Roxy Music and it reminded me of Toronto. I heard it first at my friend Adam Bristow's house in Kingston, Ontario, and it was then that I realized that I could hitch hike to Toronto and be there in a few hours and nothing could stop me. At fourteen Toronto was a long way away. I spent my first weekend in Toronto going to nite klubs then hitch hiking to Toronto became a way of life until I finally moved here in '84. I do not know what I was listening to when it occurred to me that I could save up, fly to Amsterdam, be there in a few hours and nothing could stop me but it must also have been good. It could easily become a way of life.

I sat thinking about my friend Nina who I met at Trinity Square Video and is the only person I met there with whom I really hit it off. She had eyes that can not hide her excitement and honesty. She had straight white hair that whipped around at the sound of the word "travel" or the name of another continent. She had had the travel bug for many years and has always done her best to satisfy it. She has been to many places, many of them more difficult to pronounce than her last name which I cannot remember except that it ends with a "-sky." She had became very excited when she heard about my plans to spend four months in Europe and she had produced her white cotton money belt for me to use. We have said very little to each other but when we have talked we have both become very excited.

Oliver was designing and constructing a new housing for the toaster. Boris loves toast and I am sure she will be very happy with the thing when it is finished. It had been three weeks since he had begun construction so it had been three weeks that Boris has been toastless and she was becoming upset. I have been lovingly calling both of them toasters because they curl up together and keep one another toasty. How many toasters can Boris use anyway?

The spirit of Gertrude Stein has become firmly entrenched in my brain. It is she that has caused me to become so interested in words that I was spending hours reading through the dictionary. Oliver wanted to know what an udder was. I explained but was not sure what the difference was between a tit and a teat. Teat is the same as nipple, but tit is vulgar slang meaning nipple, or it is a small bird. Boris, being very suspicious of words, had to ask "but what does all this MEAN?" I told her that it meant that Oliver loves her for her udders and her toaster. She gave me a mean look. I apologised and admitted that my comment had been udderly toastless. Perhaps I had become so fond of english words because they were so rare there; and anything rare is valuable and exotic. Perhaps Gertrude became attached so to our language for the same reason.

My father finished a letter to me with the sentence, "Don't go climbing over that wall now." Karl had said that writing something like that is like telling a small child that he must go stand in the corner and never once think about elephants. I have gone over the wall but for some reason I am allowed to; I seem to have the right kind of passport or something like that.

It was a "Brazil" morning. I needed 30 DM to go over, five for the day visa and 25 mandatorily had to be changed. I went to the Bank and they did not deal with Visa so I had to go all the way to Zoo Tor to get money and then I had to come back and wait in line at Checkpoint charlie for half an hour to find out that they would not let me in with my painty jeans so I had to go home and borrow newer jeans from Danny and then wait in line at the checkpoint for another half hour. For some reason I got too far ahead in the checkpoint process and I missed the section where they make you change your money. The woman was very confused, somehow I must have walked through a locked and guarded door. I don't know how I did it. I was just following the arrows.

By the time I got through, the weather had changed dramatically. I felt that I had traveled to a very different place. It was only 70 m from where I started but it was a very different place. A strong wind had picked up and so much dust was flying all over Fredrichstrase that it got into my eyes.

I walked towards Alexanderplatz, easily seen for the enormous radio tower in the centre of it. The streets are clean of wrappers and junk but the city grime was still there. The buildings are free of loud commercial advertising. Instead there is loud political advertising. The government is still, if not more than ever, insecure about it's monopoly. None of the old buildings sport modern facades and very few had been properly renovated. I could imagine that I had gone back to a depressed large town of the nineteen forties. It was erie.....

I need to find the rest of this journal... I know it doesn't end here and includes all my east Berlin adventures.