On Friends, Depression and Futility

I am writing this as a particularly awful episode of depression is petering out. Slowly. My guts are still in a knot, my limbs like lead, I have lost a kilo in less than two days, but my mind at least isn’t in as much of a fog of agony and despair anymore. For now. I can't promise this won't be confusing and contradictory and downright messy and insane because my mind isn't working very well at the moment.

I’m really only feeling safe on here, partly because I am less likely to be heard, partly because probably the people who read it are only people who care. But I could be wrong even about that. That’s a fun fact about depression. It makes you question the most fundamental securities of yourself. Which I have never had much to speak of, anyways.

It’s not that these securities return. It’s just when the depression recedes – more a dirty oil slick than a wave of water, viscously retreating, rather leaving traces, than washing off clean – these insecurities are less painful, less prominent. I am a little bit more able to fool myself convincingly, I am a tad more able to live with the uncertainty, or ignore it. Pretend I’m fine to not scare or bore people off with my tedious mood swings. They come out of the blue; I can be fine one minute, and the next minute I’m on the floor, screaming, because someone has torn the shades off my eyes and I finally see things as they are.

And I can see how frustrating it must be for others to constantly have to reassure me, to not get through to me, to have to deal with the same shit over and over again.  I’m not the only one in my circle of friends with depression; I know what it’s like to feel helpless and paralysed because all you want is to give them advice, a tool, something to make those feelings go away, but nothing seems to work, there is nothing you can do to fix it. You can’t grasp why they feel a certain way, why they have those awful thoughts about themselves, because you love them and all you see is a wonderful human being... surely it should be obvious to them, too? It is unbearable to watch them suffer, and you feel angry at yourself for being unable to help and, foolishly, angry at them for giving you such a futile task. And then guilty for feeling angry. But that still doesn’t mean you don’t want to help them;  that still doesn’t mean you wish they hadn’t asked you for help.

And knowing about what it's like from the carer's perspective, I should know better when I’m down. But once I am there, I don’t feel like I’m lovable enough to be worth the trouble.

It is odd; somehow you’re not equipped for the job when you know nothing about depression, but when you do, when you suffer from it, which enables you to empathise, you’re weak and prone to get dragged into it, like two drowning people trying to save each other.

Last night it was almost too much. After crying for hours, my mind went cold, somehow, calm and sober (hah) and I went through my options. I considered for a moment to hand myself in, get myself “sectioned”, as they say. But the long term implications of that were too terrifying. What it would mean for my future, my ability to take care of myself even after I was “released”. My employability. Going “inside” would take away the last bits of life that I still enjoyed. Going in would mean losing my liberty, my rights to decide for myself. Is there anything worse? Even at my worst the only comfort I have is that I have the liberty to decide what’s best for myself, despite what the law says. How much liberty do you have strapped to a hospital bed? How much worse is it to still feel the same way, but unable to do anything about it, and even if it is just that final step?

A couple of years ago, when work stress brought me to the brink of a breakdown, I went to see my GP for help. I tried to describe to her what I felt, but I had phrased it badly; instead of saying that I have powerful intrusive thoughts of wanting to kill myself, thoughts that felt like entities that were covering my “true” mind like a blanket, suffocating, arresting, but still controllable and separate from me, I called them “voices”. I didn’t mean audible hallucinations, but boy, did my doc perk up. “You hear voices?” she asked, worried, and I quickly corrected that. Bless her, she was lovely and supportive, but in the end, she is a doctor with duties. And she told me that if she thought I was a danger to myself, she’d have to report it. I still feel a hot surge of adrenaline, of true terror, just remembering this.

So I ditched the idea of getting myself sectioned pretty quickly.

Instead,  I made plans to end it. I tried to figure out where the best spot would be to hang myself effectively from without suffocating slowly. When you’re in a particularly deep pocket of depression, you almost think about suicide methods as a sort of reward – which one would “feel” best, if that makes sense. I don’t know where it comes from, whether it stems from self-loathing, and wanting to inflict pain upon oneself. It’s not that I would want the most painful one. It’s not “want”, like you’d choose a peach off a supermarket shelf. It’s an urge. An ache. I ached for the most...forceful, final one. The one you would do the same way you’d angrily kick a wall, to tell whoever to fuck off. As if death itself isn’t forceful and final enough, the method needs to release the anger, too. Or be an extra kick in the face of the person you hate so much - you. So it’s always been hanging or guns to me (availability not considered). But then you need to balance it against which one would leave the smallest “aftermath”.

I wondered, after reading books about crime scene cleaning, what would be the cleanest and most effective way, least troublesome for T. to  clean up, or whether I should do it in the house or go off somewhere else. You know, if you sit in the bath and slit your wrists, it all sort of just drains away. Easy. I’d have to pack up my shit first, though.

And then I thought about how T. would have to tell my Dad. And how he would have to find a German speaker to write that email for him, or make that phone call.

And this is where it normally stops, my not wanting to put Dad through it. But this time I was cold, and I wanted to be scared about that, but the only thing that scared me was that I wasn't. Is that a sentence? Does that make sense?

And I would feel bad now, but I am still not in my right mind to truly regret it.

Last night I just wanted the slightest sign that somehow I was still loved enough to stick around. I know that sounds pathetic and like a massive pity party. But the thing with depression is that, once in its grip, you cannot feel or absorb love. You cannot imagine why anyone would love you; even if they do, it’s not real to you. Other people almost become an illusion. It’s not meant to demean them, it’s just how it is. And yet you need them to kick you awake, to become louder and more real than that hurricane of gloom in your head. When you’re overcome by that dark wave, your knowledge, your memories, your emotional assertiveness have as much weight and substance as spiderwebs. It takes NOTHING to shred them. This is why people keep crying for help even though they “should know better”, even though they have been reassured a million times before.

Which is why I feel so bad when I finally come out of it and see what I did to others. When they grow back into solid beings, and I see myself as a fool to not have taken or appreciated their affection, or ever even doubted it.

When the wave hits, my first instinct is to go on social media and cry for help. Because my friends are there. The problem is, everyone else is, too. And something like this will inevitably come across as attention-seeking. And then I am disgusted with myself for even thinking of going there. 

Of course you may argue, I could just call a friend. And I know many have offered. But again, as soon as I do that, isolate one particular person, I am giving them a burden they may not want, or it might be a bad time for it, but it’s not exactly something they can or would want to ignore. It’s like I am obliging them... and I am terrified they will resent me for it. Or become distant. Or leave. But I hate being like that. I HATE being needy. I know how it drives people away, frustrates, annoys, and it’s that hate that fuels the depression and self-loathing even more.

Putting it on here feels like I’m putting it out there without “recruiting” someone to help me. It’s all on a voluntary basis. People can pretend they have never seen it. And that's ok. And even if they've seen it, they can stay anonymous. I don't want anyone to feel obliged to help or love me. I'd rather have nothing; it would be an insult.

Then there is the other problem of “crying wolf”.

Now here’s another home truth about depression. No matter how often you cry out, and feel better the next morning, it is never is “crying wolf”. Depression isn’t a solid state of existence, it comes in waves. And coming out of each wave without having drowned is just another time you have survived. And just because it passes doesn’t mean it feels less acute the next time around. And each time it happens, it feels all over again like it will never end. It does because it feels like you have seen things as they really are. And no matter whether you manage to get a grip on the despair, that reality won’t change, so it makes no difference. What creates the agony is not the emotion itself, it’s that you’re convinced you see unalterable reality, something outside yourself you can’t change, no matter how you feel about it. Depression ceases to be a feeling, rather, it becomes a reality. I may feel better the next day, but I know that’s just because I managed to delude myself. And when I'm truly better, I forget that I delude myself. Which is nice. I don't mind that.

Yes, I may come out the other end. And whether I delude myself into happiness or non-depressiveness, I’d rather have the illusion of happiness, and I hang on to it as long as I can. But every time I come out the other end ALONE, the less I will be armed the next time around.

Another thing with depression is that, even though you might become more and more familiar with its pattern and should theoretically be “armed and ready”,  it wears down your resistance at the same rate. It’s like rust that weakens your mental structure and stability.

There is something about crying out when you’re in the deepest pit. The closest I can come to that is that film, The Ring, when they think they have broken the curse, only to realise that it will continue. Because all that girl wants is to be heard. She doesn’t want to inflict pain. She just wants to be understood. She wants to be FULLY understood. Because in utter joy and utter agony, you’re totally alone, and it’s that what’s so terrifying about it.

 And writing this, I come to a realisation. That’s what I wanted. That’s why I write this. That’s why I cry out even though I know it is pointless, I can never communicate what’s going on inside me fully, until someone understands how I feel, but again, that’s exactly what I DON'T want.

When I’m down in the hole, I just want to be taken seriously. I am not a drama queen, or an attention seeker, or a wuss, or having a self-pity party. I don’t CHOOSE to go down there. I don’t LIKE being this way. I’m in genuine pain that I cannot relieve myself.

Maybe this urge is just an echo of the time when I was told over and over again to just pull myself together, when being upset or distressed in the face of violence and abuse I was told to not be a drama queen. When being crippled with depression, I was just considered a Zicke. When being terrified of going back to school because of the amount of bullying I got from students and teachers, I was just told to not make a big deal of it. Like it was my fault to be upset. It’s my default reaction now, to worry that I will be brushed off and not considered worth the time and help. Intellectually I know I am... but the rest of me doesn't.

Of course I want to stop reacting this way. But I don’t know how. It's like trying to stop your hand from flinching from a hot surface.

I can only ask, forgive me for sometimes being needy or difficult.
Yet it makes me angry because I shouldn't have to apologise for that.

I have no final sentence, or clean paragraph, to tie the loose ends of this post. I'm just throwing it out there. Dealing with depression is an open-ended battle, with no answers, with eternal repetition of the same shit, that it seems futile for all involved. Anyone know any answers, I'm all ears.

Review: A Field Guide to Lucid Dreaming

You can called it lucky or cursed – I have always had really intense dreams. Dreams so vivid they often form half of my reality, their experience so strong they would affect me in my waking life. There is the old joke about a girl waking up and punching her clueless boyfriend because he cheated on her in her dream. Yeah. Not that I have ever done that, but that intense.

 I’ve had dreams that haunted me for days after waking up, and dreams making me feel unspeakably happy, more than anything ever had in “real life”.

I had serial dreams about a stalking monster as a toddler, and about the Faceless ones, and about that woman that looked like my mother from behind but was a cruel, deformed creature once she turned around to respond to my calls. Freud, Jung, and any dream analyst on this planet would have a field day using me as a guinea pig. Archetypes, classic and more postmodern symbolism, it’s all there.

There was a brief time in my life so traumatic that I didn’t seem to dream at all. And although I know it was just my mind trying to protect me from things I couldn’t handle, it was an incredibly grey and empty time, too, like a part of me had been amputated. It had, in fact – when dreams comprise a large part of your experience for all of your life, suddenly not dreaming feels like you’ve been lobotomised. Then I went on Prozac, and it was like adding fuel to a nearly extinguished fire... it flared up, the dreams returning, even more powerful.

When your life is dominated by dreams, you inevitably search to make sense of them, like you would of any experience. To your brain, it doesn’t matter whether you’re asleep or not: whatever you experience has the same value to your emotional makeup. What you’ve felt is what you’ve felt, no matter when and how. Reality becomes relative in emotion, maybe that is why people often don’t dream or can’t remember their dreams after a traumatic event. And why PTSD is so sinister and self-perpetuating, because the flashbacks and nightmares distress you the same way over and over again.

 So inevitably, you try to get a sense of control over dreams. Especially when your dreams are so horrific that you just want to wake up. Or when they’re so beautiful you don't want them to stop. It might be a fool’s business, attempting that, to some at least. But I had heard of lucid dreaming before, and I might have had a couple of experiences before, which were wonderful, but they were erratic. I needed some guidance.

A Field Guide to Lucid Dreaming turned out to be a gem.

Just at the first browse, it is simply beautiful. Wonderfully designed and filled with gorgeous illustrations, it is an inspiring feast for the imagination. But it’s not just eye candy.

It takes you back to the very basics, exploring the history of dreams and lucid dreaming, and how dreams played a huge role in many previous and continuing cultures, essentially showing that the Western view of dismissing them as brain gibberish is a minority, reflecting an impoverished mind... something I have long agreed with. It wipes the plate clean to enable you to start exploring your dreams with a fresh, open mind, teaching you the basics of remembering them, remembering them for longer, outwitting that twilight zone after waking in which a dream often becomes frazzled and diffused, and drifts into forgetfulness within minutes.

It explains the structure of REM sleep to help you ‘find’ the moment in which lucid dreaming is most likely, teaching you mind techniques to help you trigger a lucid dream, delivers tips on how to keep a dream journal, what to make of your dreams and how to develop a conscious relationship with them, of a heightened sensitivity that will ultimately help you reach awareness within your dream, as well as the increasing ability to direct your dreams.

I have yet to have a lucid dream. But I have only started practising, and it takes time to train your mind and awareness to the point that you will have a lucid dream. What I have noticed, however, that since employing the techniques offered in the book, the more elusive dreams have become clearer and easier to remember, more cohesive no matter how random they are. And they have started making more sense, in terms of what they tell me about my state of mind. I’ve started to write them down, and it’s wonderful – tales of an exploration of another, parallel world in which the senseless makes sense. That alone totally makes this book worthwhile.

Time

A friend of mine has something that can almost be described as a clock phobia. He can't stand ticking clocks. I personally find them calming, reminding me of my grandmother's house and the first time I saw a cuckoo clock - a magical novelty for someone used to 1970s DDR design. A 5-year-old me sat in my brother's friend's house, determined to wait until that little bird would come out of that loudly ticking clock again - until my brother told me that would be an hour, and an hour in a 5-year-old's life is a hell of a long time.
My friend, however, just dreads this audible reminder of time ticking away. And nowadays I don't even need a cuckoo clock, or any clock for that matter, to rub my face in that.
What happened to the summers that seemed to last for years?
What happened to the time when the wait for Christmas seemed like an agonising eternity instead of the mad rush it is today?
How come I seem to waste my entire day on trivial unimportant matters instead of doing what I really want to do, and how come my to do list never gets shorter?
I was 25 just recently, now I'm 34, and it spooks me, because I don't know how I got here, my body and life raced away with me while I am still stuck in a mental teenage limbo. It's unsettling to feel your life running out and your body disintegrating around you when you feel you should still be reading your school books. Maybe that is why women (and men) lie about their age. It's not vanity. It's self-denial. It's being unwilling to submit to the pressures and expectations that comes with increasing age, when they have barely caught up with their early 20s yet.

Apparently it's because a day in relation to the life you have lived already is much longer when you've only lived four years, but much shorter when you've lived 30.
For me, it's also the sense of time running out. That may sound crazy, but the past ten years have gone by so fast it makes my head spin. And I have been warned, it's only gonna go faster.
So I am anticipating that whatever time is ahead of me, as much (or as little) as it may be, will pass in a heart beat.
The thing is, we never know how much time we've got left. I've had that reminder a few times, and it made me quite paranoid. I've lived fairly unsettled for some time now, and many friends I've had from all the different places have come and gone - something which has never got easier for me. I've been told it's natural and I should accept it, but I can't - it hurts too much. You could say, I'm almost always in a panic to spend as much quality time with everyone as I can, because I never know how long it will last, how long I will be able to be around them, and whether I will lose them to distance, forgetfulness, or worse.
I will never have as much felt time again as I had when I was 20. Then you think you have an eternity ahead of you, and it leaves you relaxed enough to be able to focus - nowadays I just seem to run at top speed just to keep up, and never quite managing to, trying to get everything done at once, my concentration frayed into a blur.

How can you trick your brain out of this? Maybe it's to really make yourself believe you are 2o, to reach that feeling of eternity ahead of you.

Simon: "I had a dream about nuclear apocalypse. It was animated!"

Me: "You haven't even seen Barefoot Gen yet."

Simon: "I know!"

Me: "My work here is done!"

Simon: "I was all running around in those burnt circles where the bomb had dropped."

Me: "There'd be more than just a burnt circle. Or less. Depends on how you look at it."

Simon: "And it was all grey."

Me: "Like an East German tower block."

Simon: "Or a Kraftwerk album."

I get up and make us coffee. In the background I hear Noel Coward starting to sing "Don't let's be beastly to the Germans" from Simon's laptop. 

Typical morning at the Jays then. 

Consenting Adults - A Review

I have never been much of a theatre-goer, not because of a dislike of the medium but simply because one didn’t meander in the right circles. Until university – if it teaches you nothing (or makes you employable), it will broaden your horizons, often not by what is taught but through the people you meet. But I digress. What I meant to say is that I have no experience with theatre and its critics, am innocent ignorant of its politics and semantics and might therefore produce a pile of wank based solely on my limited understanding, grandly calling it a review.

I had no idea what to expect, but in my mind I saw an ordinary stage with the audience neatly separated from the action into rows of velvet-spanned chairs, while the actors would dramatically fly around the scratched floorboards of the stage, seamed by dusty curtains matching the upholstery.

What we got instead with Stagepunk Theatre's "Consenting Adults", as it premiered at The White Bear Theatre in Kennington, was a small-ish room lined by two rows of chairs where the border between stage and audience is made up by the toes of the latter. There is no way of hiding in your seat during uncomfortable scenes, removing yourself from anything that scratches your comfort zone with demon claws. You are as exposed as the actors – in some respect, your reaction becomes part of the play. I have no idea whether that was intentional, but it helped. It’s what makes theatre so appealing to me: it’s the rawhide of dramatic performance. It is immediate and in-your face, rather than the overpolished recordings of film. I cried when I saw Hamlet on-stage in November (starring three members of the aforementioned theatre group). But "Consenting Adults" took it to a whole new level.

As we edge ourselves along the row of seats, plonking ourselves down with our pints wedged between our feet, the stage is littered with boxes, abandoned toys and various rubbish. Simon Jay sits motionless on a workbench facing the wall, with his back to us, eerily reminiscent of a scene in the Blair Witch Project. Monty Python’s Intermittence Music doodles in the background, enhancing the grotesqueness of the image while adding a strange sense of humour to it. I am already spooked, and the image is so strong I fail to spot the other actors. Until the pile of rubbish in the centre of the stage literally explodes, spitting out Stephanie Jane Gunner sans clothes, the innocent babe, who, from the second of her emergence will be stripped of her liberty of mind, her dignity, and become a creation of her own visceral responses.
What follows now is a continuous, hour-long violation of my subconscious. The kind you wanted really, bitch, while acting coy. The sweet, scratchy nostalgic sounds of 1950s sex-ed PSAs (if you remember, the PSAs of those days even made nuclear holocaust sound like a picnic) fill our ears, conjuring up images of innocent ponytailed girls in petticoats being prepared for their entrance into the adult world of romance and old school chivalry. But what happens onstage turns it into sinister mockery. Molly, totally at the mercy of what society teaches her in theory, soon enough learns her own lessons. The gap between the friendly sweet neighbourhood advice ringing from the speakers and what actually unfolds on stage widens quickly, drying my throat. A sense of betrayal pervades the first part. Molly seems a victim not just to the vile men she loves, or her ill preparation by those in custody of her, but by life itself. Seeing her with her head in a box of emotions, being seemingly violated by the sheer insanity of her own puberty, then lying on the floor, twitching in shock, is almost too hard to bear. Having her lie at your feet makes you feel as guilty as a passive bystander who doesn’t want to get involved.

Molly moves in stages through her female evolution, each time emerging as a new character. Her vulnerability is shed, hardens, with each new experience, each new boyfriend ripping away a piece of the sweet innocence, reshaping her expectations and her resolve to adjust. Too much a prude, lose your man to cheating, and become a vixen, seeking the bad guy. Bad guy hurts you, you resolve to become the Iron Virgin, cold and angry and closed up.

The rape scene – yes, there is one – is not brash and cliché or in any way gratuitous, but much more fluid, starting from an innocent dance. It’s the type I call the 'boyfriend-girlfriend rape', the type that makes a girl question at what point she perhaps unwittingly consented or whether she consented at all. The type that will shake her up to her foundations, not knowing her role in it. There was no ripping of clothes... the image of bad boy Steve, played by Simon Jay with a dark elegance and bleak psychopathy, tearing down his zipper was more sinister than flying buttons ever could have been. It’s clean rape, rape good enough for The Times and the Upper Classes, none of the National Enquirer filth, rape that keeps up appearances, covering the hell beneath, but this way so much more horrifying. There was no screaming. Molly did not know what was happening to her, at what point this had turned against her. That they were fully dressed just added to the shock. Stephanie delivered an amazing performance, both subtle and powerful, every inch of her screaming out what was going on inside her. Seeing the emotion in her face was too genuine to take lightly, the frozen shock, brokenness, endurance, confusion, watching her shake – it made my guts cramp up. I had to remind myself if wasn’t real.

The one question that pestered me throughout this part of the play was: Is Molly becoming her true self, stripping herself of her societal education to become an empowered female or is she just a reactionary product of her experiences? It makes it a thoroughly feminist play – but it has none of the blind man-hating gusto that comes with some of those. Rather, it seems to uncover the ever-perpetuating violence, whether recognised as such or not, against women, but also their part in it.


The second part appears to be completely disconnected from the first. At first glance it seems like a harmless, weirdly sado-masochistically sexualised version of Jeeves and Wooster. Simon Jay, playing a posh gentleman called Algernon, engages in light and jolly conversation with his butler Alec, played by Zack Polanski, but the conversation quickly degenerates into sheer perversion while never losing its lighthearted tone. As the interaction goes on, Jeeves and Wooster appear to morph into a bizarre cross with American Psycho, at times in the lingo of the AOL chatroom play of a grooming perv, without failing to deliver the upper class manners the Empire prides itself on. The combo makes you laugh, but the laugh comes uneasy. It is disturbing, but at times so grotesque it creates its own comic relief – but the laughter bubbling up in you is veined with guilt. The juxtaposition of the sweet and the brutal, the posh and the vile becomes so extreme at times that your laughter turns into a form of psychological defence. Don’t get me wrong, it IS hilariously funny... but sometimes you feel you shouldn’t be laughing at these things, but can’t find any other way to cope. Yet the aftertaste, at least to me, was not foul... I felt enlightened.

When Lady Bracknell enters, dressed in a strange Victorian outfit, something in me clicks. She is a grown-up version of Molly, a hardened woman of dubious gender, the exact opposite of the creature that was born at the beginning and the final product of her experiences. Now she is not just perpetuating sexual violence, she wholeheartedly embraces it, only to comment in a blasé manner on its medical dangers.

The play was hard work – it wore you out, the ever-changing mood from funny to shocking pulling and pushing you, leaving you ever unprepared - It felt very much like Life itself. Stephanie Jane Gunner’s acting was intense and heartfelt, pushing every nuance, probing into every emotional nook and cranny. Zack Polanski gave you both the sweating testosterone driven male without becoming his own cliché as well as the jester-licious butler type with a healthy dose of deranged humanity beneath, and Simon Jay was, as ever, of disturbing elegance and emotional intensity which seems to become his trademark.

So what have we learnt today: Consent is shown to be not just a simple yes or no... it is a psychological process that will change you for good and from which there is no coming back, but at no point would it permit either the characters or the audience a remittance from responsibility. Yet there is no black and white/either-or mentality: it demonstrates and acknowledges that there is no such thing as either a victim or a participant. It questions the very nature of psychology and self-awareness; humans appear both enlightened and self-aware but simultaneously prone to their animal instincts.

"Consenting Adults" was not just a play but a powerful reproduction of the nature of life itself, of the psychology and evolution of sexual communication, a sarcastic and grotesque commentary on social etiquette that would yet not fail to smirk at itself... something that hit almost too close to home for me, but for this very reason becoming a masterpiece. Like John Osbourne once said, it has only merit when it evokes a reaction ... and tonight John Osbourne would have been proud.

Breathing

There is the old blonde joke about the blonde you have to tell to keep breathing.

But have you ever noticed how, when you become hyperconscious of the way you breathe, you walk, you move, all those automatic things your body is programmed to do without thinking, it suddenly becomes difficult to keep going without falling on your face, without suffocating?

Some days I'm so conscious of my breathing I suddenly can't seem to breathe. My body tenses and my lungs somehow seize up. Weird, eh?

Witney's got talent

So this guy wanders into our shop and approaches Sally and me. Needless to say, being all splendid at customer service, we're all ears, expecting him to want a recommendation or something sane like that.
But the man isn't here for books, nosireee. Instead, he asks, looking slightly sheepish, whether we could give our opinion on his singing. He wanted to go to an open mic night, but was shy and wanted to see a public response to his voice on a small scale before he put himself out there.
So obviously he came into a bookshop for that.
I could tell that what was going through Sally's head was an exact carbon copy of the content of mine.
(Whatever you do, don't laugh! Don't make eye contact. Oh shit, this could be the mystery shopper - do make eye contact. But in a strange removed way that does not allow him to enter your soul and throw a mental anchor, prompting him to come back every day. Do the dissociated helpful customer service smile. Pretend all is normal; as long as his dick ain't hanging out, it's fine.)

And because I thought it'd probably cause less aggro and embarassment and because I attract strange people A LOT and should be used to this by now, I agreed to listen.
(Sally, in an astonishingly quiet and inconspicuous way, managed to slither away.)

After much rationalizing and emming and err-ing, he started. And I pricked up my ears, waiting for the inevitable power ballad.
And he goes...

"Head, shoulders, knees and toes, knees and toes,
head, shoulders, knees and toes, knees and toes
And eyes and ears and mouth and nose..."

INCLUDING the motions.

You know, when you have to stare and you know it's rude and you can't help it, and you don't know whether to laugh or back off and get the maze out and your every fibre just screams "OMGWTF"

Well, yeah...that.

He stopped and looked at me expectantly. Over his shoulder I could see Sally, staring with wide eyes and barely holding back hysteria. My eyes searched for possible mates of his who might have sent him in on a dare. No joy. I had to conclude he was mental and that it's best not to upset the patient.

"Well", I said, diplomatically. "This might work if they are all really really drunk...?"

And would you believe it, he thanked me and left?

Hell, at least I have met my quota for the month.

Gratification Burnout

From rampant hedonism to bleak anhedonia,
my vesicles are dry-heaving

Sun

I've always loved my windows facing east. I've had a few of those, growing up. And West windows, which are great for afternoons. And an unlucky dark North one. That was shit. It makes you feel like you're always removed from life, you can see the bright sunlight and how it is there for others, but somehow not you.
But East is definitely a winner. That way you catch the sun rising in the morning, and you wake to a bright burst of sunshine through your window. Which happens on about three days a year here in England. The quality of morning light, between 9 and 10 am, is my favourite - it is at its most full-blown but still purest and unblemished... afternoon sun is yellower, heavier, dustier, making you feel more sluggish.
There was this painter – Monet, I think - who spent days painting the same scene over and over again, because the quality of light would change the quality of the scene so radically it seemed wholly new.
Take the Grand Canyon at sunset. Every five minutes it's practically a new planet.

I hate the word "Sun worshipper", but there is something to it - I can see why people worshipped a sun god. Sitting up in my bed in the mornings, that sun hits my face right on, a pink glow through my closed eyelids, and it feels like a drug coursing through my system. It is more immediate than any drug I can imagine, and purer, without the bad effects. Alcohol calms me and makes me feel carefree, but it always feels a little like grimy sludge in my system as well, it is never pure, perfect happiness.
Now I sit here, with my morning coffee, the caffeine mimicking the heartbeat of an excited child about to go on a seaside holiday, and fooling my consciousness into true but fleeting happiness, and my eyes are closed, blocking out the world, and I am getting, as they say at gas stations, a full tank.

It brings back my memories of Texas, of Arizona, of California, of how full of light these places were (I'm deliberately ignoring the dark underbelly that every American who lived there for some time will probably howl at me, while laughing at my cliche-ridden tourist view.) But fact of the matter is, I have spent some of my most perfect, complete days there, as short as they were... something which I probably, admittedly, would never achieve if I lived there for an extended period. Places are only fleetingly beautiful, they all show their true face eventually, and it is best to move on and not stay in a place long enough so you won't get violated by the badness of it.

I remember when I first walked down the street in Santa Monica, CA, and the road opened up and there was the Pier, bathed in Californian sun, that I had only seen on TV so far, that was a prop to years of daydreams, a focal point, something I clang to in my hope to get away. It had been a setting in a story I had dreamt up and written for years, a story that filled me completely over these years, like a counterpressure from inside me to stop the pressure of the world I hated around me from squashing me. And finally it was there, for real, just a few steps ahead of me instead of unreachable thousands of miles away, and I didn’t care whether it was just a tourist trap, it was beautiful and perfect to me. And the day remained perfect, from the people I met, to the music that blared from beach radios, to the scent, to everything that happened, and I wanted to bottle that day and take it with me like the vial of a drug that could put me into that happiness any day I needed it.

I remember when Pat and Patrick and I headed back from the Texan Gulf Coast to Dallas, and how Pat drove back via country roads, so we would see the beauty of Texas instead of the dull freeways, and how the heat beat down on us like a damp hammer made of cotton wool. We stopped in a place called Virginia, which had beautiful old trees and Southern mansions with giant American flags hanging limp and sleepy in the summer heat, long before patriotism had developed the nasty fundamentalist flavour it has now. I had a banana split blizzard from a Dairy Queen, which did little to quench the heat in my body but tasted so good, and it was a perfect moment of contentment and sublime happiness that I didn’t want to end.

Amazing how cheesy it sounds when I reread this. Maybe it feels sentimental now because I have lost the ability to feel that way, because it was based on innocence and naivety, two things I equally scorn and miss. If I had the choice to go back and be that naive again, I wouldn’t know what to do. It was bliss living in that ignorance, in that stupid mindless worship of something that didn’t really exist, but the joy of that worship was the main goal, not the object I worshipped. It just hurts like hell to have that innocence torn away from you, that ability to enjoy without being wary; I don’t want to go through that again. I would have it back, though, if I had a guarantee that I’d never lose it again. What have I gained from the knowledge I have now, from the cynicism realism. It's like Scout says in "Generation X":

"the price we paid for our golden life was an inability to fully believe in love; instead, we gained an irony that scorched everything it touched. And I wonder if this irony is the price we paid for the loss of God"

I have, since then, tried to re-create that happiness. It never works, of course, one only gets a snippet reminder, a weak version of the original burst, like that drug that will never be the same again after that first hit. I've kept memorabilia, I have a Mountain Dew bottle full of Death Valley sand that feels to me like I bottled some of that joy and I dare not open it lest that spirit of that day escapes or at least gets tainted by Today. I tried to grow my own Joshua Tree out of seeds I bought in a mid-desert store, and even though they promised me a mini tree after about 10 years, it has never grown past the size of a fleshy blade of grass, which makes me think this is exactly what they sold me: a fleshy blade of grass. I'm afraid to say I'm a gullible tourist.

Anything, anything that works.

And I am terrified, should I one day go back there, that it will never be the same carefree perfect beauty before, where the world unfolded in front of me like a perfect daydream, either because I am no longer capable of feeling that joy or because something will happen that will sully that dream. What else will I have if even that dream fails?

Hot Authors - the Wishlist

Usually, when you see the little photo of brilliant authors on the back of a book (or on the internet, which is usually the case when the publisher doesn't want to deter the punter from buying a book), you tend to be disappointed by how incongruent the brilliance of the mind is with the vessel that contains it.

(Right, I am so opening myself up here for abuse, and I can't really talk, having a frog for a face myself, but I am just a sucker for beauty, sorryverymuch).

Not that it matters, because if Alex Garland published literary excrement, I wouldn't look at him twice.

But then you get the occasional gems which make my heart jump with joy because there I spotted a literary nirvana, sexy books written by sexy people.

So here is a list of Beautiful MBS, and please feel free to add to it.

Alex Garland - "The Beach"
Wil Wheaton - "Just a Geek"
Ben Schwartz - "Breaking Bad News With Baby Animals" (ok, it's not really a book book, but it's still fucking funny!)
David Benioff - "City of Thieves"
Poppy Z. Brite - "Swamp Foetus" - pretty and dramatic in a gothic way, just like her stories.
Chuck Palahniuk - "Fight Club" - the man has a twisted mind, but he is not a scarecrow.
Jack Kerouac - "On the Road"

Childhood Trauma no 1

Up until about a year ago, I thought Moomins were just a figment of my early imagination. But then that book arrived in our store, and I nearly dropped it, screeching "OH GOD THEY ARE REAL!!!"

I have a very very dim memory - which I even thought was no more than a dream - of some mousy-elephantish looking creatures hiding in a house, while outside a sinister, dark creature approached, nothing more than a black lump with red fires for eyes and a mad grin and a pointy nose.
I must have been about two, and I remember I was terrified of that image, but neither my parents nor I could remember whether that was real or just a nightmare.

In subsequent years, I had serial nightmares of a similar creature I called the Worm, which regularly invaded our home, living in dark nooks and crannies, and in the land beyond the mirror. Sometimes you could see it in the mirror, a reverse landscape I was always fascinated by and wondered what it was like to be there. Mind you, this was long before I ever heard of "Through the Looking Glass".

In some of my dreams there was a cupboard near a mirror with a curtain instead of a door, and when you crawled behind that curtain, there would be a hole in the wall that would let you through into the mirror world. One time I foolishly followed that path, ending up in a mirror version of my flat, which was eerily silent and deserted... until a rustle made me jump, and when I peered into the dark corridor, I could see that this was where the Worm lived, that nameless lumpy creature. And I raced back to the hole and crept back into my own world, hoping it wouldn't follow me.

The Worm would appear in all kinds of unexpected places. On my way to the bathroom to brush my teeth, I would spot its long pointy nose sticking out from behind a dresser where it was trying to hide, and then it would lunge out and charge for us while I screamed "The Worm! The Worm!", running back into the lounge, where I tried to hide my family in cupboards before floating up to the ceiling myself, hoping to God it wouldn't look up.

At other times I would sit in the bathtub with my baby brother, and suddenly the floor of the tub would tilt and open up a gaping hole into which we slid, and the Worm would be down there, groping for us.

And its babies would be under my bed, screeching and poking their needle-sharp noses through the mattress (good Lord, what would Freud make of that??), into my back, giving me something that felt like seizures of terror, and I would wake and scream for my Mum and Dad.

The Worm was the single most terrifying creature of my early childhood. And I think it had its origins in the Groke... except that the Worm was infinitely more scary.

About 12 years ago, when I first met my friend Peter in Berlin at a Christmas party, he recited me this tale in his marvellous Queen's English, an excerpt from "The Moon of Gomrath", in which a dark, evil creature called the Brollachan possessed first a horse, then a little girl.

"Now the Brollachan", Peter said in his spookiest voice, with goosebumps creeping over my flesh, "had eyes and a mouth... but he has no speech, and alas... no shape!" He told me how it was blacker than black, a shadow in the night too dark to comprehend. "Somewhere near the middle... if there was a middle", he whispered, "were two red points of light."
And I realised he was talking about the Worm... it was the first time in years I had actually thought about it, and I had an invisible cold hand crawling down my spine, because Peter's story hit me square in my subconscious' nuts: "The pony turned its head and looked at Susan. Its foaming lips curled back into a grin, and the velvet was gone from the eye: in the heart of the black pupil was a red flame..."

Things like this make me wonder if there are archetypes of evil planted in our subconscious, ideas that cross cultural boundaries, because if there is a Collective Unconscious to mankind, as Jung describes it, then surely similar images representing similar ideas would pop up all over the world. The Groke (it's original name is Marran; I remembered it as Morrah) is Swedish, the Brollachan is a Scottish legend... and what about the god Kaonashi in "Spirited Away" (god, that creature always hit a nerve with me)?
That's ultimately more scary than just a single child's nightmare, no?

Childhood trauma no 4

On the destruction of the geriatric metanarrative

I always had an inkling I would be a crazy cat lady. Dad predicted from an early age (mine, not his) that I would resemble my grandmother, something which I fought vehemently and yet find more and more applicable with the passing years. Nan stopped at every animal she encountered during her walks around town, making cute noises, and she always had some treats in her pockets for them. It was a source of embarrassment for me when I was young and foolish, but now I am just like that (well, I haven’t arrived at the treats yet, but I am sure I will get there eventually). It’s got to the point that some of my friends point and laugh whenever we watch that Black Books episode when Fran is labelled as “aunt Millicent, who lives in the crooked house with 20 purple cats, and she has sex with them all”.

I defiantly started collecting cows, but the truth is, I bloody adore cats. I don’t mind dogs but cannot abide the sucking up and emotional dependence. Cats are criticised to be fickle and “fuck you” , that they own their masters, but that’s what I like about them. They get what they want and then they go their own way. I wish I was more like that.

Anyways, the splendid year I lived with Kate, I also lived with two cats – a treat in the pet-unfriendly renting market of the UK. Dolby and Theta are old and wonky, but amazing, both in their own ways. They have mannerisms and personalities and cracked me up many a time... especially Theta, the old blind man with a penchant for getting spanked , sitting in impossible spots, nosing and nudging his way under duvets where he would sit purring like a 1920s car motor, and sporting splendid Batman ears and ballet feet. We always imagined him as a bowler-behatted English gentleman who has a sex dungeon and wears fishnets and gimp masks on Saturday nights.

Sometimes I just sit and observe them. And this is what happened one sunny summer afternoon in the garden, something so defining and Theta-esque, I had to write it down.

Theta blindly shuffled around the flowers that grew by the garden path, nosed them, investigated closely, while I watched, with the usual affection and amusement for his wonky antics. He looked like something out of an old ladies’ fantasy, flower-sniffing kittens and the like, the type you see reproduced on cheesy G&Ts greeting cards and who are only ever cute in real life.

Finally he gingerly, ever so carefully, set a paw in the midst of the feathery bush of blossoms that grew by the path, then the other, then finally the last two, blinking, until he stuck out of that floral lump like a feline, short-sighted garden gnome, pretty as a picture. He looked like he was trying to play the trump card in his and Dolby’s never-ceasing battle for my affections. And it nearly worked.

“Awwww Theta, you darling...” I managed to say - but then he lowered his behind ever so slightly and stuck out his tail. And when his ears pulled back into Batman formation and he squinted concentrated into the dusky distance, I knew what was coming. Shattering my granny fantasies, he unceremoniously dropped a huge dump into the virginal blossom crown. I could almost hear them scream like prissy maidens.

With little regard for this violation, he hopped back onto the garden path, blindly located the epicentre of his business and then, in a vain effort which was barely more than a symbolic gesture, he ruffled the flowers around it a little to cover up the deed and then scampered off.

I love that cat. Have I mentioned that?

Summer the first

Tonight, I’m sleeping with the window open, because it’s been stifling hot all day, hot enough to remind me of my Texan days, where the heat could lull you into an exhausted doze in no time – except here we do not have the reprieve of air conditioning. When it’s hot, you can’t get away.
But we’ve complained about the cold for so long that we have long lost the right to whinge about heat until at least August.

The air now is a silky balm, pleasantly cool without being chilly, billowing mildly in the dusk, just that temperature where your skin can’t sense it anymore as a contrast to itself and you almost feel suspended because suddenly, the atmosphere seems gone and time stopped. The sky is a royal blue dome edged with turquoise where it blends into the silhouetted tree line, and speckled with the first pinprick stars. Orange street lights glow in the evening blue like grand still fireflies. It’s a night glorious enough to sleep out in the open.

Back in Cowtown, that’s just what we girls did. We dragged our old mattresses from our beds out onto the balcony of the decrepit house we shared on the edge of the village, a balcony large and deep enough to hold five mattresses lined up next to each other. In the midst of this harem-esque bedstead we sat, giggling like school girls, drinking pina colada mixer that went warm too quickly, and cheap wine, and told each other stories from the life before. And later, we slept, the country air as nourishing as soup, enough to make us full and saturated when we woke. Sometimes it was almost too much for me, being used to stale, thin indoors air, the night air would give me intense dreams which made me feel exhausted the next morning. Birds in the massive cherry tree next to our house would wake us at 5am, crying and screeching at the sunrise.

My life has always taken strange turns, and my timing always seemed off. I was three years late finishing high school, but played mother at 19, and in my mid-twenties I finally came as close to that girly sleepover I never had when I was a teenager. Maybe that is why I feel life so intense, overwhelming joy when good stuff happened, but crushing grief when things go wrong – my life never happened to me when and how I anticipated it, but all elements seem to show themselves at other, unexpected points in time, making things feel just “more”, because they are out of joint.
For someone who craves security as much as I do, and as much as it torments and confuses me at times, I almost enjoy that kind of unpredictability. As long as I know I can hope for something good.

How David Hasselhoff brought down the Berlin Wall

At least, that's what he thinks.

It's been 20 years, kids! 20 years!!! And I remember it like yesterday.

Life comes around

And every time you vent your spleen,
I seem to lose the power of speech,
Your slipping slowly from my reach.
You grow me like an evergreen,
You never see the lonely me at all
...
Without you I'm nothing

Black Books's got nothing on him

Just around the corner from where I used to live is this old little bookshop. Just as it should be, in a side street, nothing flashy and high-streety, full of obscure old titles mixed in with your grubby second hand book.
It's been there as long as I've lived here... but what I didn't know until a little while back is that it's actually quite famous. Famous for all the wrong (which, in my book, makes them right!) reasons.
It's because the owner, Rodney, was absolutely bonkers. Some found it endearing, some entertaining, some terrifying. I personally adore a shop run on abuse, it's the ultimate novelty and gives a nice break from the annoying suck-up customer service we've all been violated by at one point or another.

By now I have met quite a few people who had either been served by him (doesn't this give 'serving' a whole new meaning) or worked in the same business. The professionals usually say that Rodney has pissed off quite a few people. He has certainly creeped out a few.

My friend Iain told me about how he was browsing for poetry books one day, and, as he was leafing through a Shelley book, found Rodney peering over his shoulder.
"Shelley, huh!" grumbled Rodney. "Dead, i'n't he? His 'eart's buried in Bournemouth!"

Rodney had a go at me once (which extracted internal squeals of delight from me) for using the word "dissertation": "It's a thesis, goddamnit!"
He also regularly abused his bookshop minion, his "Igor", if you will, that freaky little man who once pretended that the clock integrated into a giant hideous painting (weird paintings was another thing they seemed to sell in there) was his wristwatch.

All in all, Rodney is the antithesis of all that the Waterstone's Get Selling campaign stands for.

However, the younger generation, with a few exceptions, loved and adored him. The man has his own facebook fangroup, for crying out loud!
It even went as far as a team of TV production students filmed a documentary about him.
In case you don't believe me about how equally nuts and endearing Rodney is, watch it.

On films and the reality of childhood

Bloglag: 5 months

I have been sick for the past few days and spent most of my time wrapped in a blanket, drinking lemsip or hot chocolate, snotting my brains out and watching films.

One of them was E.T.

Since I first saw it in 1987 (that’s when it first made it to East Germany), I have watched it more often than I can count. I saw it a gazillion times in the cinema, back in the day when you didn’t have to sell your last shirt to afford a ticket (50 East German pfennig for kids, the most expensive ticket I ever bought was 2 East German marks, which still was only about between 20 and 50p, if at all, by today’s standards).

You’d think a film would get old and stale, and most films these days do for me, but I swear, watching E.T. made me cry every. single. time.
I am gripped and wrapped up and swept away by it every single time. And when I think about it, I am pretty sure that E.T. was one of the most intense, profound experiences of my childhood.

That might sound lame and geeky to some, or like I haven’t had a childhood to speak of.
But the thing is, my childhood happened mostly in my head, in my own little world. I don’t know how universal that is, but I strictly filtered what I would allow in that world... reflecting on that, that’s a skill I should readopt. It might well be that this would “reduce” my life to the imaginary, but I have never seen it that way. It’s more like, expand my life to the imaginary.

This is the, admittedly cheesy, truth: E.T. was one of the few stories that acted as a surrogate for a lot of things missing in my life back then: affection, the tolerance and embrace of the soft, emotional, beautiful, sentimental. I have always been an emotional, soft person and I do believe that people are born to be a certain way, but I didn’t necessarily grow up in an environment that fostered and nurtured that. So whatever I couldn’t express and live around my family and friends, I would channel into something else: my dolls and stuffed animals, the stories I played and made up and finally wrote down, the books I read and the films I watched that could grow roots in me and fill an emotional hole – fiction or not, they served a purpose. That’s why stories exist. That’s why films and stories and that secluded little world that my dad believed would be my downfall are actually the things that made me what I am today, or more so, kept alive what I was born to be, constantly battling against the cynic, the bitter hag, the deranged, twisted creature that is the dark half of mine.

In the past months I have worked my way through many of the deranged films of the Tartan collection, read a lot of twisted books and bizarre magazines (make that a capital B), and it is as the saying goes, the wolf in you that you feed is the one that gets stronger.

And when I watched E.T. today, I suddenly remembered what I miss so much... and I was relieved to feel that I still am capable of being that person.
It’s not that I want to give up one side for the other, I embrace both of them, and both of them are just coping strategies. But I have had that vague feeling for a long time, that somehow things have gone wrong, that I am not the person I wanted to be, that life has turned out to be not what I wanted or expected, and that turning around and groping my way back is not going to be easy if I have forgotten what I’m looking for, what I used to want, what I used to be like. It’s like my core got buried in a mental mindshaft that collapsed under the weight of real life and bad choices.
E.T. is that reminder, some sort of guide post, a scratch in the bark of a tree that I recognise as a marker of being on the right way.

Evil Eye. Oral. Or written, even.

I've been in a foul mood recently, something my poor boyfriend has put up with amazingly patiently, and usually I am not a great believer in slagging people off, but when it gets to the point where THEY. ARE. JUST. BEGGING. FOR. IT., it's really hard to restrain myself. And more often than not I feel bad because it is a really naughty thing to do, but my tolerance does have limits. Maybe because I'm getting old. Maybe because I am getting to the point where I'm losing hope.
Let's say, I can tolerate them if they are far away from me, and I get agitated if I have to be around them... I'd rather, for the sake of my own sanity, surround myself with nice and pleasant people. It makes me a nicer person, too, and I usually haven't got a problem being nice. I actually enjoy it. Yet I am here bitching my head off.
Well, they may have taught us differently in Bible School, the whole shebang about that it's easy to love those loveable and that true saintliness lies in loving the unlovable, but to be honest, I have never applied for the saint job, and I personally am favouring the verse that mentions the not throwing your pearls to swines and wasting your energy on things that aren't worth the effort.
So here I am, kind of handing out verbal nominations for the Darwin Awards, or more like, I wish some people qualified for them, i.e. removed themselves from the gene pool to do mankind a favour.

Stupid people get my goat, usually. I don't mean ordinary stupid people. I mean people so absolutely idiotic and self-absorbed and irresponsible and retarded that I want to bang my head against a wall until I am no longer capable of perceiving them.

Panzer

A while ago I was going through old photos. Can’t get enough of them – the older, the better. Whether it’s to look at old fashions and laugh about them (and be secretly ashamed to have partaken in them), or marvel at how skinny we used to be, to trigger memories or to wonder at our innocence/ignorance at all the things to come – the people we would become, and the gap between our expectations of the future and what actually happened to us).

I also love looking at other people’s photos – somehow it makes your friends more three-dimensional and even more loveable to know what they were like when they were kids, and how they came to be the people they are now, which is why I pester them at every opportunity for photos and childhood stories. You then don’t just bond to the few years you have known them. It makes you feel like you have known them all your life.

I have some pictures that seemed pointless at the time they were taken. Why get a shot of the view from your bedroom window? You see that every day! It amazes me now, though, to see how architecture has changed, how the East German standardised children’s playground has changed into something adhering to health and safety laws and how the scrawny saplings behind our house have turned into thickly foliaged trees. Some of these photos I merely took because I wanted to show my host family in Texas 12 years ago what it was like where I lived, not knowing that these would be the remnant documents of my childhood I managed to salvage before mother could run off with the rest of the household.

And then there are a handful of photos that strike me as plain bizarre. Almost alien. Parts of a past that is so opposed to everything we live and believe now that it seems entirely like someone else’s life, and although I used to live in the middle of all this, I now remember it like an independent observer… as if my kid self was just a character in a story. If I didn’t have those pictures, I might not even remember at all. They are little pieces of conserved past, pinning down memories that would otherwise dissolve and be forgotten.
Like this picture of a Soviet Panzer rolling past our living room window.
(Whoops. I lied. It was German. Dad told me that according to the Four Power Agreement, Soviet tanks weren't allowed to drive on German soil. They could be transported, but not driven.)

Dad remembers the exact day. It was 30 April 1984, the day before the International Worker's Day, and the tanks were moved closer to the city centre to be ready for the parades the next day. The tank came from neighbouring Berlin-Karlshorst, which was the district housing the Soviets, heading towards Strasse der Befreiung, now called Alt-Friedrichsfelde.
It was the same street our school was on, and the same street Gorbachev came driving down when visiting Berlin in 1989 or 1990, the street we lined up along, shouting “Gorbi! Gorbi!”, which infuriated our fiercely communist Russian teacher.
We had quite a few Panzer parades back in the days. It was always cool and exciting, but in retrospect I wonder why they organised those parades. It was always treated like a celebration, a celebration of East German and Communist power, but now I can’t help but think (what may be a statement of the obvious to those who were older and more aware of the political power play in those days) it was also meant to serve as a reminder to us who held the reigns. In the end, we were only the Soviets’ buffer.
There were Panzer parades on regular occasions. We already heard them when they were miles off, a deep rumbling which would, when drawing near, start shaking the glasses in our cabinets. The Panzer chains plowed over the asphalt and left white tracks, like a car’s skid marks in reverse. Sometimes they would carry medium range missiles, which was equally impressive and terrifying (as a Bomb child, I was in permanent fear those things would go off in front of our house, and I always naively let out a sigh of relief when it had passed us, even though they would have still done considerable damage exploding a few miles down the road.

We lived near a big intersection, where our street crossed Strasse der Befreiung, which, in the direction of Berlin’s city centre, would turn into Stalin/Karl-Marx-Allee, a majestic boulevard with a Stalinist architecture intended to impress. At that intersection, the tanks would turn and rumble towards the town centre.
Strasse der Befreiung was the road the Soviets entered Berlin from Poland, the B1 that directly connects the two. The Soviets, depicted as our soup-supplying, chocolate-distributing, child-hair-smoothing Big Brother, while our grandmothers repressed stories of how they hid in basements from getting raped and pillaged by those same soldiers. (Not that you can blame them… after all, we practically flattened their country.) Strasse der Befreiung, which earned a bitter twang of irony because of the kids it killed like stray cats, when they tried to cut their way to school short.

By the way, that street is not called Strasse der Befreiung (Liberation Street) anymore. It was one of those things that were eagerly changed, almost with a sense of shame, not just about the Nazi past, but also about that we fell straight from a brown mistake into a red one, repeating our past just in different colours, like a teenager swaying from one extreme fashion to another.
Most of the past is a mere memory now, a fleeting image, because hardly any hint of the past remains, everything having been demolished or being derelict now or turned into discount shoe shops.
There is a debate about whether removing cultural artifacts is a good or bad thing, if they are artifacts of a totalitarian regime. I can understand demolition as an act of liberation, but somehow, the place where I come from hasn't got historical markers... the ones we've got are displayed with a sense of guilt, or hidden away in museums. It wasn't a good history per se, but trading it for the pretense it never happened can't be the right way either. All I really got are some old photos... but they do the trick.

It just feels like a significant period ended, well, as an anticlimax. But then maybe, so does life.