I’ve been operating under the conceit for the last few weeks that I’ll just save up all those ideas for blogging that I never got around to and just file them in—at some day in the near future offering an unlimited stretch of free time, mental clarity and non-distracted motivation—chronologically as if they were blogged on that day even though I just time-stamped them for that day, today. That is, turns out, pretty stupid and delusional. Blogging simply does not lend itself well to the faked past tense as-if-present-tense mode. So, I hereby promise to resist and forgo the urge to fill the gap of no-content of the last four weeks as if something was written then and simply acknowledge that sometimes life happens to the extent that blogging doesn’t. That’s actually not so bad. Having life intervene.

Among what I did want to mention, though, were (1) the death (and life) of Dash Snow last month of a heroin OD (he had a gallery in Kreuzberg and did the most memorable piece (imho) at last year’s Babylon exhibit at the Pergamon Museum (think glitter, cum and newspaper clippings of Saddam Hussein—if that rings a bell)), (2) three sun-related songs for the Tuna da Week to commemorate Berlin’s first uninterrupted stretch of solar radiation (from Townes van Zandt, the Jayhawks and Jason Lytle of Grandaddy) and (3) three consecutive stories of mild violence against strangers who were sometimes me.

I’ll just go ahead and go over the first story of that last bit because it was the one of the craziest, most assumption-altering things I’ve ever seen. On July 30, a Thursday, I was coming back from work on the U-bahn (on the U8 to be exact) when a bespectacled busker, vaguely Rasta-looking-but-probably-Spanish musician dude stumbled druggily with guitar onto the train at around Kottbusser Tor, a k a the Bermuda Triangle of Kreuzberg. He started strumming and then immediately stopped to speak with the woman with greyish, short-cropped hair on the other side of the glass barrier separating the doorway from the seats, speaking over the barrier, leering, “You’re a lesbian? I have songs for lesbians!” That made me pay a little more attention than I already was, considering he was standing pretty much right in front of me. She, not betraying an orientation in any direction, understandably suggests he immediately perform sexual intercourse with himself and gives him what they call in German the old Stinkefinger. He then yells to her, holding a wide and utterly clueless smile, something to the effect of, “Wow, you’re a feisty one!” She and her younger friend get visibly more agitated. She calls him an idiot and other things along those lines while flashing more angry hand signage. He starts to get louder and more annoying, pointing and yelling, calling her disgusting, clearly trying to raise the agitation higher. He seems now to be a little drunk, the annoying kind of drunk. At this point, two skinhead-looking, muscular, possibly BILD-reading fellows, whom I might be inclined to profile as football hooligans, stand up. They’ve had enough. They walk from the other side of train, over to the guy and tell him in no uncertain terms, centimetres from his face, to kindly shut the fuck up. He says no thanks and continues to spit invective at the lady, literally spitting. At this point one of the hooligans places his finger on the guy’s head and pushes it back until the guy’s head hits the window of the door behind him. Then he smashes the guys head a little harder against the glass pane. Unfazed, the guy keeps babbling louder and faster, still smiling, which was enough to motivate the other hooligan to remove the guy’s glasses and snap them right in half. The guy has shut the fuck up. The train occupants are unanimously happy and some begin clapping. General applause increases and then stops. Most delighted is the woman who was verbally attacked. She thanks the two hooligan-ish fellows several times. They demure and sit back down like nothing happened. The musician, who looked Bohemian cool but was also an ass, stumbled off the train at Kotti, clutching his broken glasses, muttering to himself. This all happened in the space of about two minutes. And that was the time I saw two skinheaded hooligans defend the honour of a subway passenger who was orally abused by an otherwise peaceful-looking busker.

Weird and surprising things also happened in the following days.

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