From over the hill

Allow me to drool on about my personal life for one night. Every blog post needn't be hard reportage, it's not as if I'm getting paid. It's a quiet night here in Berlin, not even a plane in the sky, only the sound of a hose running interminably in back of the Rewe market, I'm on the back porch of my little sublet. We have a 20-foot strip of Nature running between us and the back of Rewe, home to a skittish black cat who won't touch our leftover fish scraps.

Let the old man babble! I've achieved a sort of temporal milestone these last days, and write to you, my 13 unlucky followers, as a 30 year-old man, with the papers to prove it! Say what you will about the arbitrariness of calendar years, but 30 has some real psychological implications. A person isn't particularly considered young any more--the number feels different, reflexively. You read a story in the paper about a 30 year-old man--whatever the poor bastard did he was old enough to know better, you decide, after all he's fully grown, a Man. You don't get special prizes for Most Promising Young Blogger, because really you're not such a Young Blogger any more, and should have no need for little gold stars--no, you're dumped in with the rest of the dogs, fighting for your life.

I could, theoretically, be a grandfather. Come sit with Grandpa Warfield, I've got some real purty little anecdotes that I'll just take off the shelf here and dust off a bit. So yes, I've entered my fourth decade of earthly hanging-around. My friends and I celebrated with a small party halfway up the waterfall in Viktoria Park, with cake and vodka and some New Orleans jazz on the radio courtesy of NPR Berlin. My friend Al Burian was there, splashing around in the water and drinking from a plastic cup--and he's 38! I may yet have some fun in my life!

In fact, were it not for my neuroses, I'd be having a whale of a time, 30 or no! We are having a real summer here in Berlin, days on end that are sweltering and call urgently for swimming and ice cream, nothing else will do. I'll pay for it some time, my sinful idleness, but the passing days demand little more than trips to Schlachtensee, where swans swim alongside naked urchins in the shade of the shallow water. It cannot last!--and coming to accept that transience is the first task of my 30+ spiritual development. Boys become men, Liam, they gain paunch and succomb to change, to death even! Even dreaded winter has its day, one cannot push mightily enough to stop it! I'm supposed to quit smoking now--it was a youthful promise, forged in the youthful conceit that I'd not actually see 30. Judge for yourself, by the tenor of my prose, whether I've held that promise, or whether sly Nicotine is guiding my hand...

But details, man! Our small apartment is a bit crowded these days, we have a houseguest staying, visiting from New York, one Hamilton Morris. He's a nice guy, an interesting guy. He's a rare breed of New Hippie, I think, and I say so unslightingly; not a carrot-munching earth-humper, but totally plugged-in, net-savvy, traversing the globe in search of exotic drugs and beaming wild-eyed transmissions back toward civilization through innocuous media like Vice Magazine, for who he on occasion writes. Yony was back in the States for a while and I was terribly lonely, unable to make friends or communicate with these fast-tongued Germans, but since he's been back a small posse has been forming, fellow swimmers and drinking buddies, and there's fun to be had, some of it even healthy.

Afraid I won't continue tonight--consider this a fashionable appearance, if you will, just in-and-out. Will return with further stories, further pictures.