Feeling knackered from caning too much SHOOM, I stubbed the cig and went on my boring errand: like every Monday before the blackout. 

Normally I’d bike, just roll down the hill. But the back tyre’s punctured. But life’s cyclical though, right? And so on and so far hoping to be tenacious I scurried into the courtyard, glanced at the window next to mine, there’s a window set back to one of my windows and this is uninteresting but I look inside cos I wanna know: behind the glass it’s murky, a few shelves, a few spines of compact disc cases, a double-width mirror, a few cardboard boxes piled up. And like always it was a quick peek into that always unpopulated room. 

Ghosts wheel all over this city, with their translucent bodies, I didn’t see one then but everyone here knows that about ghosts. 

Walking past our letterboxes and the name printed, the slip of paper saying Quitman, you are Herr Quitman, I ignore it thinking fire-fuck: need to sort out my life, get new strats, new energy for speedrunning. I open the passageway and am in Monumental Street. Its greyness is my kind of emotional texture I would say because I enjoy urban greyness and concrete. I dash beside the cemetery wall where Bruno S. is buried, where one time I saw this white mouse sniffing and exploring the leafy pavement cos it was November I remember. Yeah along this grim path and further down’s this boutique, selling fabric handbags and cushions and meta-masks and in the murk, you see stooled at a little table a woman sewing. 

Part of her kit is this magnify glass attached to a robotic arm, I yawn.

A song sang in my ear: Can You Take Me Back? 

That snip on the white album, it went with the cold sky as down the incline from the railbridge my gaze panned. Rooftops. Treetops. Eroded pylons. Life is out there in the sea like the holy TV tower stood always, since 1969 its steeple, the chrome bauble sending messages in the fading grey soup. Aloft in the sky was the Checkpoint balloon, that big blue sphere called THE WORLD. Purple vapour to the west was the SONY circus tent. Behind my back the sun hid rotten. Such a dull day and I dunno, this feels pointless but.

. . .

We go on and to get the heart pumping, cos it rarely beats above tempo, I kind of strode with purpose and overtook this dog-walker this ambling old lady who made me think like most of the elderly here make me think briefly of World War Two, all that rubble in KODAK colour of a mash of bombed buildings, the Brandenburg bearing a line of these skeletons banging tom drums. I dunno: just thoughts. The road slopes down to Mehringdamm. And I m-march with a nip in the air cooling my face, my blood warmer, plenty of traffic, rush-hour’s engine pumping bass into my marrowbone, yet roughly a third of my mind focussed on my blocked gut. I’m never fully good unless my plumbing’s okay, I felt. And the most powerful whirlpools are maelstroms, Charybdis belched a vortex, I semi-digressed. Then considered my intestines from the context of how will my poo-clock flow once I find a job? A pedestrian light flashed red so I made a thin smoke, held it leaning out of the right side of my lips when then speed-walking, treading on cracks in the paving flags, for fear of falling underground, cos my mum broke her back, her spine I recalled on passing the dead waterfall, the pond stagnant-brown and that statue of a devil-like fisherman embracing a mermaid. 

What’s that metal made of, I wondered.

And I’ve been thinking, Berlin is a solo-player lobby.

People, yes you could call them non-playables if you were gonna be obvious. They crisscrossed the road and a woman I’d have married if she’d have asked me, not that she would’ve but I would have said yes I’ll marry you, in adidas trackies she pushed a 1980s-era racing bike, we looked at each other kind of significantly but speechless, no nods. It’s okay though. I eat vegetables. And it’s fine to be an alone man. I got my aesthetic and my books and my little maze. A smell of frying butter wafted from some posh maybe French restaurant. I dunno. Restaurants seem off-limits. On the corner opposite Kruezberg chemist is a cashpoint, a clunk of metal you could topple and it’d crack a skull, it’s stood in this archway where a man on the deck lay swathed in blankets and a sleeping bag, yeah on the floor, all you could see was his burnt-looking face, parts of his cheeks corroded.

He said something and I said hey sorry and turned to the ATM, withdrew sixty euro, getting skinter and skinter, jeez.

Need work fast, I think and lift my right foot. And then I put my right foot forward. And then put my right down and do the same with my left etcetera.

Weaving past so many white faces, so many eyes, thin bars of light went thru me. One however, man of my age, had this snarl on his brow aiming at me I sensed cos he’s a dog who smelt the dog in me that smelt the dog in him. We almost barged shoulders, idiot knew I was on a mission. Near EDEKA a woman pinned right into my gaze and after three seconds I felt she’s going to look away but four seconds and five into six and seven ticked in my head and she maintained a stare, this deep lagoon in which I’d have swam, I’d have skinnydipped but no I blinked without the balls to smile. SHOOM: at hundred percent completion you’re awarded two-hundred k worth of studio hours to record a new kind of sentence akin to a new kind of noise. Eyes are swallowing. A small peloton of cyclists sped by and one guy looked, the bastard. I hated being seen. Like this woman glanced and the mirror of my clawed face in her brain disturbed my thinking. Tattooed on her wrist was a tiny dolphin. And now editing I see all this old-fashioned filler: stale cooking oil carried on the air, from a ventilator. The sky paled into the edge of night and streetlamps and shops, restaurant windows glowed for business. I dunno. My belly eased. My steps fell into a rhythm. Always there’s this man who reminds me of a Tibetan monk outside BIO supermarket where he sells a newspaper and I’d look in his left eye seeing a network of bloodvessels and we would say hello but over this past winter of gas-prices I began to be less enthusiastic, I didn’t want to say hello and he too seemed unarsed until now I trudge by as if invisible and feel him blank: not searching my gaze. He can do without my embittered hello. Only in and out of my head I passed him then and this wahwah xylophone was playing a beat which is my own beat cos it’s important to have a beat, I thought in order to feel good and this is on the pavement opposite the sci-fi and fantasy bookshop on err. 

A street sign says: Bergmannstr.

Click all positive options, click yes, allow, agree, apply, register, save, play, open, install, continue, maximise and then disconnect. 

. . .

Every Monday I visit a clinic where junkies collect their substitute drugs. I’m there now, my left elbow pressing the plastic door-handle you never touch with bare hands, even before the bug, I open it, this door with smudged glass and go into the passage for a small grey lobby with these I once counted them six plastic chairs. A smell laden with nothing. I’m masked. I lean in the doorway hear the notice: Wait here. Wear a mask. Be not intoxicated. Thru there is the surgery where the clinician administers our drugs. A fellow patient stands at the counter, his face has the mossy greyness of a rock and seems defeated which makes me feel better about my life as he drones on talking like he has problems, monologuing to the guy employed to give us our daily meds. Four minutes go by, according to the LED clock. Bored as my gut squirms. A piece of A4 paper tacked to the wall, the printed shapes of ink say all patients need to pay for scripts by the 2nd of.

I survived another winter. I staved off homelessness, the living-in-a-tent vision. Haunted by the day I’ll be on the streets. When I am geriatric. If, in the year 2058. Those’ll be end times man, when you got no bed to sleep in of a night, it’s frosty and your choices are A: wasted under a railway bridge or B: a faceless hamlet like No Man’s Heath. I really don’t know. We used to be able to tell a person’s taste in music. Like you could predict when walking past a stranger you’d clock their footwear and scan clothing for designer logos in dialogue with other designer or sports or no logos, checking accessories, anything dangly they wore, how their hair was styled: eight times out of ten we’d have an idea of what tunes a person liked, specially if they wore headphones.

Remember SONY Discman?

When the guy employed to administer our drugs said Next I moved to the perspex screen and said hello and he said hello in the same emotionless tone. Then, as he typed me into a computer, there’s a disinfectant canister attached to the wall and I pressed the lever, dispensed a fine mist over my palm which I squeezed, both hands, rubbing them, killing the bacteria and I hated the way the man who administers the drugs stares at my details on screen. With deep peering scrutiny. He put on the counter a plastic beaker with a yellow top that I took to the pokey lavatory, just a pan and sink and a mirror into which I dived and swam and saw a face masked in a soiled-white FP2, longhaired, neck unshaven, a leather bomber similar to Warhol’s I thought. He showed how we can turn our lives, anybody can, people on the street can transform their mundane life into art and once I’d unscrewed the clear beaker, placing the yellow top on the sink, I peed in it. The thinnest bronze dribble. A rusty syrup. Stuck to the piss-jar’s side was a strip of white medical tape printed with my name and DOB I read when turning the lid shut, thinking the System has Squitman 08/06/77 in its Addict.Database.xls. 

Perhaps delete this but: cos of germ-fear, bugs swarm this building for sure, I used my coat sleeve to unlock the toilet. 

Transparent like me, the screen at the counter has a square hole thru which I put the beaker onto a small medical tray. It’s where all patients drop their urine sample, this tray so the guy employed to administer our drugs never gets diseased piss on his fingers and I popped the beaker down and asked: Do you want money? But it was in German and garbled and what I’d said translated to asking if he wants yellow. Do you want yellow? Yes he said fumbling round his desk to grab a receipt, issued by a chemist in Wedding (north Berlin, where him with the limp in the Nazi party set up office when the fascists first came to the city) and I dealt him a twenty euro note and got back a handful of sticky coins so right after I’d dropped the filthy bits into my front trouser pocket I returned to the disinfectant, pressed the lever and squirted my: damn I’m bored. 

Yeah, compiled a little wanky list that in the field of English prose has produced the most outstanding flow in a noise or a kind of proto-synthcore direction. It gives me pleasure, you see, to distil books I’ve purchased into a bogstandard spectral canon. Now I wanna say: I studied at TOSHIBA Lit Academy. So the choices are as much influenced by syntax (and grey clouds) as the synth-philosophy you unearth (when with a pickaxe you go looking) in each of these epic texts. One rule is that to advance in this game-of-dub the solo player has to transform their bedside into a library. They spark a few joints and listen to Burial, Leyland Kirby or the We Are Phuture mixtape cassette (1991), to anything aesthetically decent anyway, as long as it echoes that way while you go from text to text: Sartor Resartus, Moby Dick, Nostromo, the selected bones of Joyce and Beckett, Pale Fire and Herzog, The Nova Trilogy and Gravity’s Rainbow. Each of these are ideal for the brain experiments I’m doing.

King Kong’s bollocks, I thought open-mouthed at the surgery’s tiled carpet. 

Months it’ll take to crack that many books, to complete SHOOM one-hundred percent. Because. Stricken by the fact that to give yourself meaning you crouch before a keyboard typing words, commas, full-stops. That’s the game. With its bone-simple rules. Just remember: repetition is key. You need nobody, just the alphabet, a laptop with a word-processing package, a small library, a contract to rent a room in an alien city and a job. You need the internet and solitude’s important. But that’s it. Copy a few memories and paste them twisted. You’ve got an ideal platform for producing your own seething whirlpool: a Skazz: a misfit survivalist guidebook.

A snag with Monday is I have to neck all three of my Subtext in one go. Each under the tongue. The man who administers, Sven, can’t be arsed to say why but he’s a pure archcretin. Which is a word I’ve been saving for someone like him. Sven does what’s called a controlled observation of me necking the dose: three pills. He takes them from a wooden drawer compartmentalised into squares holding different piles of whites and capsules. Big money in drug-value. As he handles a pair of rubber tweezers and pops eins-zwei-dreimal, I, like any old addicted fox, I watch with a side-eye to make sure he drops three tabs into a paper slip on the desk that he bangs with a brass pestle, he whacks those pills to dust. This irritates me on an opiate-bloodstream level because they feel better solid under my tongue, it gives you the long melt into warmth and hues and I once asked him not to smash them and he said: Uh? The officious dick smashed them anyway and gave us the paper which now reminds of papacy and I focussed on the broken chunks and chalky powder before I unmasked my warped mouth and tilting back my head to sprinkle the pouch beneath my tongue with twenty-four milligrams of synthetic morph. 

Boring drug fact: If you’re speechless and pause on the cigs, if you can keep your mouth shut and your tongue as motion-free as possible, three tabs of eight mill of Subtext take twenty minutes to trickle down the gullet in a bitter stream. Bitter but with an enjoyable aftertaste, if you’re that kind of synth junky. 

Sven hands the medicine bag with my weekly pills, finally. Three strips of six capsules each for a three times a day habit, equals eighteen tablets at ten each has a streetvalue of one-eighty euros but it’d mean lurking outside Papa Tobacco’s in Kottbusser, peddling them one-by-one to druggers in the rain. For that reason perhaps, dunno, I immediately stored them in the zipped part of my rucksack. Once stuffed in the pouch I said tschüs to Sven, whose photograph is among other staff photographs on a wall in the doctors down the road. Under each face it has a job-title and under Sven it says: Practice Manager.

. . .

I went outside, in a dark which invades if you let it: few streetlights.

Almost clenched against the cold this tiny woman perched on a doorstep. I said hello having seen her in the drug clinic loads, like today, now we’re revising, I saw her, always in red plastic sunglasses, but today no glasses and she’s always alone, seated in different entrances around this block and I think about her sometimes, when washing a dinner plater for instance, she’s kind of mousey and I relate to the mousey and the ridiculed, people unbound by surface appearance. We learned this from Skazz. But anyway when she said hello you saw the plume of her breath in the cool air. It was too chill to be on a doorstep. Yeah. Normally after the clinic I’d go the second-hand bookstore in Mehringdamm because there’s a rocking-chair in which I sit stationary no rocking as the opiate begins to flow, I just sit and check out different styles in novels. I purchased Ellmann’s James Joyce from here cos I wanted to learn about the copy-&-paste master’s life, which he interwove into prosework. He was dub. 

Tonight, I gave the shop a swerve and nipped to buy green: the leaf that clears vision. 

I crossed Gneisenaustraße. The main road where if you go underground in winter you’ll see the platform crowded with alcoholics, faces from the clinic who cluster and drink and laugh and chat nonstop, occasional yelling, scrapping, exchanging punches and kicks and I now see: Gneisenau was a Nazi battleship named after a Prussian field marshal who fought Napoleon. 

This U station here I remember being plonked on a bench, a Friday night pre-bug but in my own war. I poured redwine into a disposable coffee cup. My phone, connected to free WIFI, played this half-hour remix of You Made Me Realise and nobody cared, streams of people got on and off halted trains that I drank deep into the cup, listening to electricity warp and I glimpsed this man you’d see begging and his method is to silently embark a busy subway wagon and he bears his right hand going from seat to seat, without a word but asking each passenger to fill his soiled palm with coins. A religious gesture. The times his hand cupped at me I clocked his chipped-black fingernails and faced him, shook my head, whispered: Tut mir leid. Once he cupped it to a middle-aged businessman who sat kind of vacantly behind a pair of wire-rim laboratory glasses, his face stiff and the holy beggar raised a swivel finger saying fuck-you and anyway I saw him that Friday underground as I sat getting into the flow, needing it before I went to this other bookshop. Each week the bookshop owner served roast chicken and potatoes and thirty-odd Americans and Brits sat in a dim backroom, smoking, drinking, talking about Berlin, reminiscing how they’d been meeting here for years. I just listened, now thinking of it.