An amazing
album by
The Flaming Lips. My acquisition of this album warrants a
tale...
I was living in
Berlin and had only a couple weeks left in that
fair city. The other people on my
study abroad program were gone on vacation or
doing their own thing, and classes were over, so I took to my usual habit of
wandering the city alone. I was living with a
German friend of mine, and he was gone visiting his
ex-girlfriend, so I had his half of the apartment to myself. Prime time for some
quiet introspection while
wandering the streets.
I took the train from
Warschauer Strasse over to
Friedrichstrasse and walked in to
Dussmann to listen to some music. I wanted to find a violin piece I had heard earlier in the semester at a concert we attended at the concert hall on the
Gendarmenmarkt. I found it after much searching, but the version they had in stock sounded like shit, so I went back upstairs to browse in the popular music.
I was flipping through CDs and worked my way around to 'F' and saw what I at first thought was a soundtrack to a 70s film, judging by the cover. I had bought a Flaming Lips single of "
She Don't Use Jelly" long ago, and I thought this CD would just be some
random silliness. I took a listen and it sounded interesting, a blend of strange drumbeats and bass, backed with strings and guitars that floated in and out between stories sung about scientists and
Superman. It sounded like an
opera here,
Rocky Horror there, bits of
Ween to the left, a
children's storybook to the right.
Cool.
I bought it and walked outside to the German summer to continue my wanderings. I think I got an ice cream and walked around through
Mitte for a while. Something about being in Berlin for six months had made me
lonely. I got along alright enough with the people in my group, but there was plenty of
infighting and strange relationships abounded. I had been involved in a
lust triangle (really a square if you get technical...) that turned nasty on a trip to
Amsterdam. It was me and another guy on my program (from my school nonetheless) who were
chasing after the favors of a rather attractive and sexual girl with a
boyfriend back home. We shall call her
Salomé. Salomé was off vacationing with her boyfriend as I walked past the
Palast der Republik and the
Berliner Dom with my bag filled with CD, pens and journal, books, and my few remaining Deutschmarks. We avoided each other now, she giving me
the silent treatment after I caught her in bed with Boy #2 in our
youth hostel in Amsterdam.
I liked her a lot, mostly because she was one of those
women who know how to kiss, who give their whole being to
pleasure.
It was but a lustful adventure. I had come to Berlin and left behind a
girlfriend, the first girl I had been in love with. I hadn't been able to push her out of my mind for months since the last semester ended back in the States, and for most of February I was
miserable and
pathetic. But by the time I was walking over the
Spree that day, she had graduated and I was left with some bizarre
emptiness that didn't really come to the surface often.
Friends I made in Berlin were fun to hang out with, but I had made few of them, and I was starting to feel uncomfortable around everyone I knew. It's a strange feeling that persists today: I feel like I'm trapped in an
inability to understand anyone but myself --
everyone else is completely unfathomable.
I thought about these things as I wandered through the streets and rode the
trains. The quiet I kept that thick afternoon left me calm and aloof. I sat, read, ate, kept to myself. I was going home soon, and then things would be back to normal, I would return to old friends and
comforting things. Nevermind that coming home would just bring more of the same
detachment.
I walked up the dark stairs to the apartment, sweaty and tired and silent. Frustrated by being alone and about being so
aloof and
standoffish with every other person I met. I dragged Mathias'
headphones over to the bed, turned out the lights, opened the door to the
balcony and the
evening air. Put in the CD, sprawl out with headphones on. I listened to the whole album and smiled. It's
the theme song to my loneliness, or at least one of them. One of those pieces of music I'll always remember, since it came into my life when I needed something.