The Island

When I moved to Germany, the most common question that people asked from both the American side and the German side was simply: why? I come from a small town called Scotts Valley, which is a little town nestled in the Santa Cruz Mountains. It is a quiet little place that, despite its look of a town perhaps more suited in the Sierras, is actually only about ten minutes from the beach. On tour, people will ask me where I am from, I say Santa Cruz, due to its proximity and general coolness factor, and they respond with a quizzical look. Why would you leave there for here? The truth is, I don’t really have an answer. I couldn’t say that one thing drew me to Berlin. I remember when I was thinking of moving to Europe (and that really was my destination – just Europe), I was originally thinking Paris, due to its literary heritage. I pictured hanging out with writer-types like Henry Miller, up by the Sacre Coeur, hitting up pimps for a few Francs they owed me for running an errand, or selling bad poetry on the streets to buy my next baguette and a bottle of wine. But then I thought about it a bit more, and realized I am not really much of a wine drinker, nor is France still on Francs, nor are there very many pimps to be found in Montmartre these days. Also Paris, like nostalgia, can be costly. And that was what Paris had become to me – nostalgia for someone else’s city, someone else’s memory.

Beyond nostalgia, I am not Henry Miller; I like to know where my meals are coming from. I also don’t know how to cut and run, nor do I reduce everyone to their sexual organs. My life is full of people who happen to have cunts and cocks, but are not defined by them. So I had to find somewhere else that would fit my dream of a continent. I decided on Berlin. I picked it because I liked it the best. It wasn’t the prettiest, and there was no mystique to it (at least not at the time), but because I remember buying a pizza for two euros when I visited, it was full of abandoned buildings, and when I told my friend Kristina (who is up on all things cool) that I was considering Berlin, she was completely jealous. At that point I decided I was moving to Berlin.

So I left the Golden State and headed over the Atlantic. I had no plan, and I still to this day, have successfully existed without one. Berlin is as good a place as any not to have one, though, and I’ve learned to discover the pleasures of a different topography. I love the lakes in Berlin. I love how easy it is to cycle everywhere, and how none of the spiders are poisonous. I love the storms that come ripping across the open sky. I love that moment when rainfall turns to snowfall. I love the hues, the thousands of shades of green that surround the city, and trees that are as high as the buildings they push against. I love all these things. Don’t get me wrong, I could make a list just as long of all the things that I love about California, but here I can do it on an island. I like cities, and cities like me, and when nature and city find that balance, that’s where I’d like to live. It didn’t have to be in Berlin, and I could have been just about anywhere, but I’m glad that it is here, and I am glad that it is now. Home is moveable, and multiple. I have many homes, and I hope that I will have many more, as it is the people, the memory, and ecology that make a particular place familiar in a way that is not just a place to be nostalgic for. Rather, it is here, in this intersection between people, memory, and ecology, that I have found another home.

These pieces of writing to come are far from some ode to Berlin, or to my life here. Rather this will be a collection of writings, some written months before, some even years, about nature and city, about how everyone navigates these changing landscapes, and what it means for the animals, human and otherwise, who live within them. Many of these pieces were composed on what I usually refer to as “the island,” a tiny islet invisible on many maps, directly under the flight path for Tegel airport, and covered in dilapidated houses. This is my Walden, my Big Sur, my 400 Euro-a-month castle I share with an ex-girlfriend, a close friend, and a strange cast of characters that ended up through soul searching or forced settlement on Kleiner Wall. They will all make appearances, because the story of an ecology cannot be divorced from the story of its animals – cunts, cocks, and everyone else.