Ruby Stark

On Tuesday, I went on a work outing to a bowling alley. My boss and I prodded each other on our way past to the bar or the loo or the food laid out. I attempted to skittle the pins in the next lane, but missed. We went for a few drinks afterwards, and when I said I was leaving, Malt walked me to the U-Bahn. I wanted him to come home with me, but it didn’t happen.

On Wednesday, my friend, Suki, came for supper. I made gazpacho soup and bread and a salad with French dressing and tzatziki. We ate and talked about why people believe in homeopathy, and about boys and having multiple irons in the fire while we played with the cats.

On Thursday, I was beside myself with tiredness. I had had three early-morning visits to the doctor to get more drugs and have my INR level checked with a blood test, so I was completely shattered. At work, we had a review meeting and everyone wrote down good and bad things about the past two weeks’ work and then we grouped them into categories for discussion. When we got to the final item, all the points were positive, so someone suggested we have a group hug, so we did. Each of the fifteen people in the meeting hugged each other person and it was very moving. I love the company I work for so much.

In the evening, I went to a programmer meetup and watched Dust give a talk about running a certain programming language on a certain hand-held device. I decided against going home to get some sleep and went to meet Malt and some work friends for someone’s leaving drinks. On the way home, I listened to Sunset Rubdown.

Today, I have pottered and, soon, Malt will arrive for supper.

Tomorrow, I get on the sleeper to Paris.

» I should have sent Matte this Sunset Rubdown line: “I am dreaming of places where lovers have wings.”

» “And if I fall into the drink, I will say your name before I sink.”

First of all, I have the feeling. It’s where you’re vulnerable to your own thoughts of what has happened, but oblivious to the outside. It’s like what is going on inside you expands to fill the world. It’s a feeling that comes the day after a late night with little sleep. It’s a feeling that is massively augmented by sex with a new person. Some other times I’ve had this feeling: the time between getting thrown off the street at one a.m. and going to bed the night after that one, the first time I had sex with Dusk, the Sunday I left Bradford after visiting Matte for the first time after we got back together.

So, my boss arrived at around one p.m. and I changed into my pink and blue cotton dress that shows my shoulders and back and scar and we set off for the brunch place. We bantered and laughed and it was good. We arrived and ate foul German breakfast, all cheese and bread and, for the meat-eaters, speck. We talked in the front room of the pub, a smoky fire making the place smell like a place in a village my Dad used to take me to for roast beef sandwiches and lemonade and lime. We talked with my boss’s friend, Margo, and I used his phone to ssh into my remote server to restart a site I’ve been working on recently.

My boss’s friend rang and invited him for supper and he said he had planned to spend the evening with me and she very kindly said I could come, too. So, we set off for a long, a very long, walk to his private office in the centre of Berlin. We jumped fences and traversed river banks (he said if I fell in, I would have to remove my clothes to avoid drowning and he would finally get to see me naked). He took my hand. I found myself feeling quite tremulous and shivery, rather like I felt when I’d gone for even a short walk after I died. We got to a tram stop and he wrapped me up in his arms. It felt weird. We finally got to his office and he showed me the helicopter and the matrix of smoke generators he is working on.

We set off again and walked to his friend’s house. We arrived with beer and wine and everyone was so warm. There was Victoria, my boss’s friend and our hostess, a nice couple with a sweet baby with whom my boss played which made my heart melt, and Margo. I sat in the kitchen with the women while Victoria told this long story about her demanding friend and, I think, nearly broke down during the telling. They chatted fast and close as they prepared food and I felt like I was in a Woody Allen film, or maybe Alice Doesn’t Live Here Anymore. I tried to remain standing and worried I was going to be sick.

We went into the sitting room with all the raclette things and sat down and cooked the cheese and I ate pickled onions and scoffed down potatoes and a cherry tomato and felt so much better.

The group asked me whether there were any German stereotypes and whether I thought they were true. Treading carefully, I said Germany was known for being ruthlessly well organised, which I found to sometimes be true, like in running orders at gigs. I also said that German people were said to have no sense of humour, but I found that Germans are always laughing and have quite a similar sense of humour to the English. Someone speculated that this stereotype existed because, occasionally, foreigners would come up to Germans and say, Heil Hitler, as some kind of bizarre joke and would receive no laugh in response.

We talked about the German guilt about World War II and the holocaust, and they said that it is only recently that people have begun to make jokes about these things in Germany. Victoria said that she had gone to stay with a French family when she was small, and the father had been in the war. Her parents had warned her to be ultra polite and respectful and not to be insulted if she received a frosty reception. However, she said she was able to translate a letter written to the man by a German soldier and that, afterwards, he had hugged her.

As the supper went on, my boss and I exchanged close glances, and I fell for him more and more. There was a thread of closeness between us in the group, two people revolving around each other in the warmth of a friendship group. When I looked at him, I felt excited, felt proud.

Finally, we had to leave to go to a colleague’s birthday party. We hugged everyone goodbye and then came out onto the street and quickly kissed for the first time since the weekend before and then we walked to the U-Bahn, his arm around me.

We got to the bar and there was Olive, Thora the birthday girl, my boss’s best friend, John, and a few others. My boss and I sat on our stools with our legs touching, not really talking to one-another, but with that secret kinship you can share with someone when part of a group. I really like John – he is gentle and clearly adores my boss and they support each other a lot.

We moved to another bar and, on the way, plugged our headphones into this jack in a wall that lets you listen to the movements of the building. We danced to old ’60s girl groups like the Ronettes. I sat down and my boss sat down next to me and I put my hand on the inside leg of his trousers – very bold, for me, with a boy – and we kissed for a long time. He stroked me all over my arms and back and neck and shoulders and the slow desire that had built over the whole day turned into a scared certainty that I wanted to go home with him.

It was half four in the morning and I said that I needed to take my drugs which were at my house, but, that, if he wanted, he could come with me.

We got in a cab with Olive and got out and went into my apartment building and came upstairs, me very nervous. We drank water and I took my pills and then my boss took off his trousers and I took off my tights and we got into bed and I put out the light and we started kissing.

I just loved the way his hands stroked me all over. He put his hand in my underwear and stroked my clit and I started sighing into his ear and then he pushed a finger inside me and I bucked and squeaked and gasped and, thinking about it now, I get a twisting in my spine.

After a while of deliciousness, I faked and then we lay together for a while. I kissed him and pulled off his boxers, feeling really scared now, and knelt between his legs and put his cock in my mouth and began sucking him off.

OK, so he had, by far, the biggest cock I had ever seen. I could just about close my fingers around it, and could only get about a third of it into my mouth. I stopped for a moment and then asked him for advice and he said I was doing fine and I aborted and felt really bad.

We snuggled for a while and he said, “So, I think we got a problem. I am not sure I fit inside you.” And I decided to tell him about being intersex and he took it incredibly well, just as another of the scar stories I have told him. And he said, “We figure something out,” and I felt so happy that he was seeing it as a problem to be worked at.

So, he fucked me again with his hand and I pulled off my dress and he sucked at my breasts and it felt so good and I am pretty sure he will be able to make me come. I really wanted him to fuck me.

We fell asleep and I woke three or four hours later and woke him up and we talked and I asked him whether he considered himself a happy person and he said he was very happy until a few years ago when this girl he was in love with died, and, since then, he has been slowly healing. I listened and hugged him and kissed his cheek as he told the story.

Later, we sshed into my remote server and he helped me set up some handy stuff. He left about two p.m. and I went to go a mozzarella burger and chips and walked through the street listening to Bob Dylan in that vulnerable/oblivious state.

I realised how desperate I was to talk to Cat. She went home with her date last night, too, and I thought how magical it would be to discuss the feeling with someone who had it, too.

Last night, Dust invited me to an ambient electro gig at a squat in Mitte. I had kind of resolved to just go straight home, but then got persuaded to go and have a drink with my work friends, Cal, Olive [the woman who invited me to go to a woman-only massage parlour but who then never called and I think might have a boyfriend but who I still can't figure out and who is now warm and kind to me], Reed, Smirk and Stroke. We sat out on he pavement in the warm summer smell and drank beer and cracked dev jokes. Stroke, who is extremely good looking, further revealed his vulnerable side with an admission that he is always telling bad jokes, and his girlfriend calls him grandpa because of his poor memory.

My boss texted me to arrange a time for meeting for brunch and I said that if he comes to pick me up, he could help me choose an outfit for the day. He agreed.

It started raining and we dashed inside and had a very cosy and funny talk about trans-continental humour, the role of electronic devices in separating or connecting us, our positions as devs who make the world for so many people. We laughed and laughed and I realised I was spending yet another evening being happy.

We went to see another colleague’s gig and it went on a bit long and the mood dissipated, so I came home. On the U-Bahn, I read a lovely email from Cat about how we are both going on dates ON THE SAME DAY. I replied and said so that means we are going on a transnational double date.

» Can’t stop thinking about Saturday, where Henry spends a day of cosy fear which ends as it began, with him making love to his wife.

» Can’t figure out if my scaredness of boysex is my intersex, the difficulty of intercourse or a misplacement on the Kinsey scale.

I remember that when I lived in Northerncity, a few years ago, Swedo, Hardcore Boy and Matte [Teena] and I were out drinking and still in the middle of town around four a.m. Someone came up with the idea of going to sleep at the social centre we all volunteered for, so we went there and played games and Matte got all panicked that the sun was coming up and we finally caught some sleep on sofas under some rough sheets of scrim.

» Had a shower and put on a nightshirt for when my boss arrives. Feel fucking horny sitting on my bed, bare legs crossed, underwear showing.

» The other day, I listened to I’m Wide Awake, it’s Morning by Bright Eyes and it threw me back to that last month with Matte before I died.

Tonight, I went to see Peaches Christ Superstar with Brown. I arrived at the theatre and we stood on the pavement and drank beers and I smoked cigarettes surrounded by the warm smell of summer. We had a skittering conversation about how God doesn’t exist and how we kept on failing to appreciate the weather and then coming to and thinking we should be noticing it more. I was fast and funny and insightful and felt very cool in my baggies and leather jacket and white t-shirt. I loved myself, I think. I talked about dying and my upcoming date on Saturday with my boss (now brunch, Capture the Flag, a visit to his workshop, a bar for a colleague’s birthday and then the dubstep/glitchcore night) and .

The show was surprisingly wonderful. Peaches came out in a white, cotton catsuit that had a high, empressesque stuffed collar. She somehow managed to be the whole of a musical ensemble as Chilly Gonzales hammered the piano in accompaniment. It was like watching a far more expressive ’50s crooner. The last song of the first half moved me especially: just her singing, “You liar. You Judas”, high high high, one spotlight on her face, slowly fading her into a ghost and then into nothing.

At the interval, Brown and I went outside and carried on talking and drank more beer. When we went back in, I sat in my seat as Peaches sang a couple of slow songs, almost sobbing, “Will no one stay awake with me? Peter, John, James? Will none of you wait with me? Peter, John, James?”, and felt perfectly drunk and warm and bathed in happiness.

After the show, Brown and I walked to find a bar, and just ended up walking the streets, having one of those wonderful conversations where you reach into another person. I told her about Potential and how it talks about the joy of having exciting possibilities ahead, and the pain of the draining feeling as they come to nothing. We talked about passing happiness and trying to hold onto it and regretting it leaving even while it’s still here. We talked about how one can look back on a happy time and the feeling, the quality, the texture of the happiness can still be so strong. I said that I was pretty sure I would look back on these last three weeks in Berlin as a very happy time.

We walked and walked and then finally came to Kreuzberg and went to my favourite pizza place. Brown told me about her recent long-distance fucked-up relationship with this bloke. She got to the part where they were sending flirty texts to each other, her in her hotel room, him on his way back home, and then said, “I’m sorry, I’m going into too much detail”, and I blurted out, “This is the stuff conversations are made of.”

Finally, we parted and she said, “I don’t know which I enjoyed more, Peaches, or the walk around Berlin.”

This evening, I went out for a drink with a journalist who wants to write about the music software scene in Berlin. I came home and Skyped with my Mum and we talked about our upcoming family holiday in France. I wrote about last weekend on Ruby Stark and then carried on writing an article for my public blog about Node.js and event-driven programming and JavaScript and asynchronicity. I found myself in an intellectual ecstasy as I dived into the code I was explaining and connected more and more dots in my head.

I have just smoked a cigarette out of my window and thought about how happy I am: excited about my date with Malt on Saturday where we will go for brunch and play Capture the Flag and go to a dubstep/glitchcore club night, revelling in all the pieces I joined together in my article, looking forward to reading the rest of the email I had just received from Cat. I thought about how my happiness is being in love with my world.

On Friday night, I picked up my friend, Archigram, from the airport and we went to the same upstairs in a shopping centre bar that Malt took me to the week before. We talked about Archigram’s lovely girl and how fun in Berlin is happening without me having to make it and drank beer.

The next day, we went for a long walk across bridges and through dusty parks in the sun and ended up at the Soviet Memorial. I had been there with my old German girlfriend, Cassette, on a freezing cold night when it was pouring with rain and we were the only people there, the only warmth in the desolate, concrete wasteland. We were really in love with each other, then.

Archigram and I pottered about and talked about the war and having children and making a family.

We popped home and I changed into my sexy, slinky red dress and then we went to meet Brown for supper at the Italian she had taken me to for my birthday and had a cosy meal talking about triligual puns and people not understanding when you are being ironic. I ate spinach and ricotta ravioli steeped in butter and we dipped pieces of bread in oil and balsamic vinegar. Then, we went to the gay/biker/hipster bar for drinks and met Malt, his cute friend, Steffi, Cal and Smirk. We talked about nginx and ejaculation and the Kit Kat Club. Malt and Archigram got along famously.

The three of us went to play Lord of the Rings pinball and then Dust texted me to say he was outside. I went into the street and sat on the kerb with him and his friends and bantered and it felt so continental to drink beer perched on pavement and have a back and forth with a group of happy people.

Presently, everyone from inside came outside and we walked to the club. We got there and then Reed and his lovely girlfriend, Thora, and Wally from work arrived and we all danced faster and harder. Some time passed in dancing and talking and cigarettes outside, and Malt and I made a mini-gang we dashed about the club and danced. He did his winning smile at me like you would smile at a beloved but dimwitted child, or the smile people do when they are mocking you. We went to the unisex loo and it felt pleasingly public with the guys at the urinals and the people in the cubicles snorting cocaine and came out and stood real close and he stroked my back and my neck and I put my arm around his waist and we both stared into the crowd and I looked up at him and he was still looking outwards and then I looked up again and he kissed me and stroked my all over my sides and back and shoulders and it felt really good.

I heard Reed’s braying voice and realised that half the company would have seen, and I cared a bit, but not a lot. The night went on and Malt and I kissed a few more times and he kept on stroking my back and bottom and sides and I remember that, when I kissed him, I pushed my hips against his.

Finally, it was five a.m. and Archigram wanted to go home so we left. We got home and the cats hurled themselves at my bedroom door for the next hour until Archigram made me get up and stop them. But it was nice to share a bed with him again.

We wandered around on Sunday in a daze, went to the new national art gallery and drank coffee. He set off for the airport in the evening and I was very sad to see him go.

On Monday, it was obviously a bit awkward with Malt. No one else commented, which was gooood. A sense of horror and it-was-a-mistake-but-I-couldn’t-have-known-in-advance-ness crept over me, but dissipated when I went out for supper with Malt in the evening. He said he would be Ok with being friends and OK with more, which was very brave. I said I had always found sex with boys difficult and that I naturally leant towards girls and he said it was OK to take it slow.

So, at the moment, I am at the precise nexus of my feelings growing or shrinking. I wish I had the full text of my old Susie Down blog so I could refresh my memory on how my feelings for Dusk evolved. I do know that I felt only trepidation and not longing int the days after we slept together. However, when we had a threesome with Tourista a month later, I remember asking her whether she was keen on him and so I was probably, by that point, keen on him myself.

Today, when I came out of work, sexy D followed me down the stairs and smiled at me with his “I am thinking about having sex with you right now” smile and I skipped away to the U-Bahn light-footed and happy.

» “They will be cleared!”

» I kissed my boss last night at a banging techno club. A bunch of colleagues saw. I am discombobulated.

On Monday, I came home and went into a cooking frenzy and made spinach and ricotta cannelloni and banana pancakes for my housemates and I. I listened to Bob Dylan and sniffed because of my cold and fended the cats off my pots and pans. As I cooked, I pretended I was making supper for a boy who was waiting patiently in the sitting room and that maybe I would serve him his meal and then give him a blow job.

We sat to eat and it was very lovely.

Since Wednesday, I’ve been out four nights running. I have finally had a week in Berlin where I had nothing planned and was busy. Things have happened under their own momentum.

On Wednesday, I went to see Yeasayer. Natasha and her bloke were there, but I didn’t manage to find them, and I invited Malt, my boss, and forgot I’d invited Cal, and bumped into a guy from work and went with him and Cal for a delicious, greasy fried-mozzarella burger in a punk rock place and then got to the venue and bumped into four other people from work so we were a big gang.

We talked about the first track of the album Cal and I are going to write: The Time I Got Thrown Out of The Lesbian Bookshop/The Lesbians Said No. Malt talked about a visit to Kit Kat Club, and so we were able to name track two: I Went to a Sex Club With a Gynecologist.

I wrapped myself up in Malt’s attention, snuggling into his alpha maleness. He is tall, and has an arresting way of towering over me and looking down into my eyes with a half-mocking, half-tender expression on his face.

We watched the gig. I was completely carried away by their rendition of I Remember as the singer’s voice echoed up high high in the rafters. Malt put his hands under my arms and momentarily lifted me up so I could see what his view of the band was like. I am starting to feel that two-people-revolving-around-each-other-within-a-group feeling. I am starting to feel that luxuriation in his company that I feel with Dusk and my closest boy friends from University.

After the gig, Cal, I and four others from work set out into the night. We hiked across a large barren area around the gig venue that felt like no man’s land, like machine gun fire was about to burst out from the darkness. We surged along, a happy gang, laughing and talking and shouting. We got to the bar and I spoke at length about pop music to one guy, and about online-dating to another girl. We drank beer and talked about the Bible and places we’ve lived and drug-dealers and the German language. The beer went down easy and, suddenly, it was two a.m. so I picked up and walked home along the wide, deserted, still, crisp streets listening to I Remember which goes, “You’re stuck in my mind. All the time.” I reached a cross-roads and stood in the middle of the street and looked down at the stillness in all four directions. I got to my apartment building and leaned against the wall to finish my cigarette, and my head flushed with the beer and smoke and filled with happiness and my smile was so wide and I couldn’t help but laugh.

I came inside and wrote all this to Cat, ending with, “I wish I could lie down with you and whisper all this in your ear.”

On Thursday, Dust came for lunch at work. I met him a while ago on the organising committee of those unconferences I was involved with in London. He looks very like Dusk: same smile, same colour hair, same shape of face, and I think my attraction to him is at least partially owing to that. Anyway, he, Malt and I talked about our jobs and it was good.

A little later, Dust asked me if I wanted to go to see Alice in Wonderland with him and a friend. I had put on a dress that morning, chiefly for Dust’s and Malt’s benefit. I now walked to the cinema in it, freezing fucking cold. We sat on a wall like a group of kids slumped on the pavement while Dust and his friend smoked a spliff, then went in. The film was terrible. We went to a Turkish place afterwards and I ate a falafel sandwich and then I walked home, yet again basking in the wonder of living in such a central and lively place.

On Friday night, I went for some drinks with people from work. We drank in a Russian place and cracked coding jokes (from fist import pain) and talked about Wally’s old job as a theatre technician (or, honk, a person with no special skills – “OK, I’m going to need three honks to set up this lighting rig”). We laughed a lot and drank a lot and talked about Dark Star and John Carpenter and the third song, Just Call Me Hank, on Cal and I’s record. A few of us went onto another bar in Kreuzberg and played table football and I walked home drunk again listening to Between the Buried and Me that I discovered on some geek’s blog.

I slowly recuperated on Saturday, making it out of the house for long enough to buy some food. I went up to Prenslauer Berg for Brown’s extremely genteel, grown-up party. The occasion was the installing of her new sofa that conspicuously lacks a boyfriend to sit on it. I talked to the journos about the dying newspaper industry and drank yet more beer and had a long, jokey conversation and half fell in love with with a pretty, blonde-redhead editor who looks like Lauren Lee Smith.

Malt texted me and said he was at Kottbusser Tor and I yipped excitedly inside and left the party about twelve a.m. On my way out, I walked through Brown’s apartment building and felt like I was in a bombed-out Russian hallway heading out into the unknown.

On the way to the U-Bahn, I thought about and interview I’d read with Al Pacino. He said that when they were making the film, he was in love, for one of the few times in his life. And he would come home from the horribleness and the violence to his girl and they would just be together. It made me wish for that railroadedness, that sanctuary, that marked-out-of-timeness.

Malt picked me up at Kottbusser Tor, and, in an endearingly formal move, held out his hand for me to shake it, and brought me inside. He was there with a very old friend from school, an interesting man who told me about his job as a diplomat, a girl he knows from University, and a third woman who, when I smiled, gave me an astonishingly blank expression that felt like a challenge. Later on, she warmed up a bit.

The bar was upstairs and small, and we were wedged in a corner on stools, surrounded by people and head-nodding techno. After more beer (my tolerance seems to have gone up quite a bit), everyone else left and Malt and I were left alone. We talked my perfect mix of bullshit and serious: his ideas for a terror trombone replacement for the Death Star, my puppy-drowning career and membership in the top 1% of programmers (a running joke), gender politics of the German language and spandex suits. We leant against each other, my legs tucked against his, laughing close and lovely.

Then, the conversation took an alarming and baffling turn. I began on a dissertation about why I think Rails is much better than TurboGears and he attacked my arguments, speaking in a tone of voice that bordered on angry. We vigourously debated the points for a while, and he trotted out the old argument about it not being OK to trust €XX million of the company’s business to default configs. I felt anger rising inside me at the feting of the earning of money. I wondered whether I was talking myself out of a job, and thought I didn’t much care if I was. Fortunately, we were able to get back on track, and had a good laugh again.

We left the bar about five a.m. and I walked home.

» I haven’t had a second to myself for forty-eight hours. Life is speeding just like I want.

Happiness is a rare thing. I hate thinking of all the times I forced myself to go to bed to avoid being tired for work, even though I was in the middle of working on a project that was making me happy. So, I have resolved to let happiness rule.

I need to be involved with something. I haven’t been involved with a long-term project since the social centre in Northerncity.

I relentlessly find activities and events and things that take me outside the house. But I’m always alone when I am in society.

My idea of making myself unceasingly busy was a partial success. I’ve watched two and a half films in the last ten days. This is an unusually low number, and I was also out on Tuesday (Lisp meetup), Wednesday (Brown for supper) and Thursday (abortive film at a lesbian bookshop). However, I don’t think I’d quite understood the required ingredients: I need gobs of all-evening events every night for days on end, plus the desire to get back to a project or exciting book. I now have the latter: I’m reading Jensen’s Endgame, I’m watching Peepcode screencasts, I’m working on my Clojure mp3-crawler and I’m really excited about trying out Node.js. I’m going to a queer femme show tonight, and meeting Dust for crepes tomorrow lunchtime. But I need more.

» I don’t want to go home, or stay at work, or go out. When I woke, my first thought was: I have nothing in Berlin to live for.

On Tuesday, I moved into my new place in Kreuzberg. The lesbians were out, and I arranged my few things in my huge room. I have a great view over a little park and out over the rooftops. The two cats are delightful: the older one, Pecadee, taciturn and sober, the younger one, Rocket, dynamic and always wanting to play-fight.

On Thursday, Musk, Vanilla, Vanilla’s mother and I all at supper together. It was nice. Things are so domestic here: we share the shopping and they buy tulips and mangoes and there is beer in the fridge. The apartment is light and airy and has a great view down the street. For the first time in my life, I am living in precisely the area I want.

On Friday, I went to meet Brown for a Vietnamese and then we met some of her friends at a weird hybrid gay/hipster/biker bar. We drank beer and talked about the BBC and Brown’s failed romance with a chap who lives in Cairo. There were quite a few gays in our party, but they were not annoying. We went on to a basement bar in Neukölln that was red lit and full of fairly boring people. I left about two and got home and played with Rocket on my duvet and wrote to Cat.

Today, I went to meet my cousin, who is visiting Berlin, and his girlfriend. We ate an early lunch in a good cafe down the road from my house and talked about the films they make and our family and living in a foreign country and my job. It was really nice.

This evening, I went to meet my boss, Malt, for Capture the Flag. It was cold and raining, and, despite some kind translations, I found it hard to join in properly because I couldn’t really communicate. But, it was great to hang out with Malt. I think I might be falling for him. We have banter and his smiles give me little lurches and he’s tall and a little protective and confident and alpha. Thinking of having sex with him brings a mixture of desire and repulsion and shyness and fear. I haven’t fantasised about him yet. But, this slow growing of attraction is the way it always seems to go with boys.

Malt left about nine to go to a house-warming party. He didn’t invite me, and I’m not sure why.

It struck me that I always give savoury names to the boys I really like: Grain, Dusk, Malt.

I got the U-Bahn back to Kottbusser Tor and walked up through Kreuzberg. I stopped off and had a soul-warming pizza and beer, then came home.

Tomorrow, I am hopefully going for a massage with Canvas.

I’ve just started reading Endgame Vol. 1: The Problem of Civilisation by Derrick Jensen.

» Out last night there was a moment, sitting on a stool, alcohol creeping up my back, people clustered close, everything around me.

» Stopped off in Kreuzberg for beer and good pizza on the way back from Capture the Flag with Malt. Amazing to live in the thick of it.

“Some players, pros, even, won’t play no-limit. They can’t handle the swings.”

It’s amazing to me how much life goes up and down. I came home from work tonight feeling pretty gloomy. I have been told to leave four tasks unfinished since I started three weeks ago. I just get going, start untying the knotted code, start cranking out lines, and then I get reassigned to something else.

I stood on the U-Bahn platform, cold and morose. I got the train to my stop and walked up the street. I found a shop and bought ingredients for supper. By the time I had gone around the Turkish supermarket and picked out my vegetables, olive oil, cheese, lasagne sheets, butter and flour, I felt happy, and sauntered back to the apartment like on a summer’s day.

I’m reading The Chrysalids by John Wyndham. The protagonists can project thoughts to each other, like a hive mind. One of the central ideas in the book is that David and Rosalind, lovers, are closer than ordinary couples who can’t think-together: they can share the same joy, think the same thought, experience the same moment. There is a passage in the book that describes that closeness of the mind being like the closeness of two people making love.

I started wondering whether one can separate conversational association from bodily association. Perhaps people who don’t relate that well when they talk can achieve a much higher degree of closeness in sex. I experienced something like that with Matte: she was sometimes so remote when we talked, but, when we made love, thoughts went away and we were just bodies coiling around each other in the dark.

So often, I tire of people. I have a happy evening with my friends or family, but, after a while, I absent myself to be alone and watch a film or write code or play my guitar or read. Sometimes it’s boredom, sometimes it’s wanting to bask in the glow of happiness not exhausted, sometimes it’s just being desperate to get back to a project.

There are a few configurations that often don’t pall: an evening full of laughter with my little sisters, brother, sister, Mum, step-Dad and their friends, or supper and a game of chess and political discussion with my Dad, or a fast night where my friends and I are a marauding gang making sport of all around us, or a night at a restaurant basking in Dusk’s attention.

Maybe just I find myself more interesting than most people.

» Sometimes, I see the veins on the backs of my hands and they just make me think of blood being drawn by a nurse.

I got off the U-Bahn at Hermannplatz and set this song by Dust Covered Carpet going. I walked along, tranquil with just a few whooshes of cars going by. I walked diagonally behind a cute, queer-looking girl with black hair who was carrying a wastepaper bin and it felt companionable and easy. The song took me into my building and through the corridor, across the courtyard, up the stairs, into my apartment; and it continued while I took my medicine and got a glass of water and removed my wristwatch.

Today, I wrote a lot of Clojure and watched tech videos and made a lasagne and cut my finger and it took an hour and a half to stop bleeding because of my anticoagulant drugs.

Tonight, I was out with Delicate. We met at the U-Bahn station and then pottered around on the street, killing time before the gig. We went to the venue and got beer and talked. The first guy came on. Words fail me. He was dressed up in a sort of poncho that was probably some sort of religious statement. He lit a candle on the table next to him and sang acapella, deadly serious, about the trials of his life. The only good part was this sort of fast, almost imperceptible waver in his voice. I felt like pouring my beer all over his candle. Then, he got out the clinky sticks. I couldn’t take it anymore and went outside and smoked a cigarette and took this photo:

I went back in and found Delicate and we watched the next band, a guy on guitar and a woman on performance art. He did squeaky, skittery sounds while she flapped her arms, crawled on the floor through the crowd and tap-danced. They did one song where the guy said, This is my favourite song of ours because [the girl] wrote it for me and it’s bigger love than real life it’s called Money 2. He then did his guitar thing and began shrieking like a pterodactyl, and the girl answer like an even angrier bird of prey. Thank God the audience were laughing. I loved it, and the strange, internalised malaise of irritation at something I can’t identify lifted.

Delicate and I left and wandered around on the street. He bought a chocolate croissant and I bought a banana doughnut and some Lucky Strikes. It felt good to be out in the quiet streets: Berlin is great at providing you your own little world. I felt happy for about fifteen minutes again, and then it faded. We walked to a bar and ate nachos with cheese and guacamole and I drank ingwertee.

Last night, I went to see my friend, Delicate, the one I didn’t realise was still living in Berlin. I knew him in Northerncity. We had supper at his dusty, exposed-plaster walled and wood-floored apartment in Prenslauer Berg. We ate pasta and tomato sauce and talked about when I died and about when he got beaten up and I troughed down some dense, brown, German bread with Parmesan and we talked about how he had a time when he did absolutely nothing: two hours over breakfast, then maybe a walk in the park, lots of thinking.

We walked around his neighbourhood in the snow and melt-water and talked a little about novels that, in the same sentence, zoom into the mundane and earthly and then out to the expansive and sweeping.

I came home on the tram and wrote some Clojure. I thought about a sensation I’ve had before, of experiencing events as they happen through the frame of my blog. Ariel Schrag reported the same thing in Potential. But, that is a cruder version of the way I put it to Cat in my letter to her this evening:

“I sometimes feel this cleaving of experience from events. Like, if something weird happens, or something fun, or something that will make a good story, I think of it in those terms, rather than just revelling in the moment. I almost compose the diary entry as it happens, re-appraise my character in terms of this ‘experience’.”

Tonight, I went out for a drink after work with a couple of colleagues. A girlfriend joined us, and we drank and it felt like a good, laughing night out with people I half click with. We talked about hypothermia and the Rocky films and German customs and Berlin residents and The xx (they played here recently and I missed them, sadly) and freelance graphic design work and dress codes. I idly thought about having sex with the cute girlfriend and the colleague. I ate some truly horrendous noodles drenched in cheese which I am at a loss to even describe. Supper turned into another bar, a kind of art gallery type place with white walls and projections and lots of hipsters. I struck out to another bar with the other colleague and we found ourselves standing in the rain in Kreuzberg, unable to find the place, so I decided it was time for home.

» Thinking about a new music project that is all clangs and dings and delicate melodies and quiet, scared singing and real real real lyrics.

I came home from work knowing I needed to do some blasted laundry. I took off all my clothes, packed everything up, slung my bags over my shoulders, set out and lit a cigarette. I bought my disposable lighter when I left England and have had it with me ever since. I don’t keep track, but this is the longest I can remember keeping a lighter.

I sloped through the snow, the bounce of my bags making me feel like a soldier, like Matt Damon in Saving Private Ryan when he says he is going to stay with his company and steps up onto a pile of sandbags and then drops over onto the ground on the other side with a whump and a jangling of gear.

I got to the launderette. All the machines have names and I opened up faithful old Herta and put my clothes in and set her going. I now sit, listening to Sunset Rubdown’s The Ballad of Little Lord and thinking about my Clojure mp3 crawler.

I worked on it all last night, bar a break to make supper and talk to Cat (she sent me a Valentine’s card with a picture of the Queen of Hearts). Usually, I would have rounded off the evening with a bit of a film, or some internet, but I just went straight to bed.

There are certain activities that give me a lasting glow of fulfillment and happiness, but if I do only them, I feel rushed and frenetic. In fact, I could order them from most glowy to most default: going out, volunteering or doing activist stuff, spending time with my friends, spending time with my family, cooking, coding, reading, blogging, making music, going on the internet, watching films, playing video games.

What if i were to only do activities high on that list? Always be producing or setting up potential or creating? I’ve toyed before with the idea of stopping my consumption of entertainment, and that is just a cruder version of this new idea. I wonder if I could do it. Certainly, if I look back at the happiest times of my life, I was spending a lot of my time on activities high up the list.