Hallo Von Deutschland

Live! (broadcast recorded earlier): So i'm currently on the ICE (high-speed international train) on the way to Berlin from Munich. It's about a 6 hour ride, which i actually don't have a problem with because i really enjoy train rides. Actually, i love being a passenger on any large-scale form of public transportation. It combines two of my favorite activities: people-watching (which manni and kristine affectionately refer to as "stalking") and observing rapidly changing landscapes. Throw on some beats and you have a 6 hour dynamic live-action music video.

So my original idea as a project for this trip hasn't really come to fruition. Actually, come to think of it none of the projects i planned to do while here have successfully been started or fleshed out. Quite frankly if you know me, that sounds about par-the-course. My life thus-far is one big work-in-progress (wow, look at all those hyphens!).

The first idea i had was to start a semi-regularly updated blog that collected and documented all the single-serving friends (being clever is working out great, thanks for asking.) i planned on meeting and tracked the possibility of them becoming real friends. There was a problem i didn't anticipate with this though. Humans are social creatures, and i take pride in this particular aspect of our species. We've been here for 5 days and i've met a lot of people ranging from incredibly friendly tourist hotel owners to a security guard that really relished telling me to shut the fuck up. How i originally considered categorizing all these different people and the circumstances with which we were brought together is beyond me. Especially when realizing that the potential for most human connections resulting in "real friends" is almost always a staggeringly large zero. An incredibly friendly dönner shop owner (more on those later) is no more likely to feel compelled to exchange information with me for a future couch-crash session than the previously mentioned hostile hostel (zing!) security guard.

Other ideas for structured projects included

- a 365 day self-portrait project that began with the culmination of the start of the trip and me shaving off my iconic/ironic mustache. I figured this would provide for two fun effects when going through the first leg of the project: watching how i changed (read: got fatter) over the course of the trip and watching my mustache grow back in daily chunks (an effect that's probably only entertaining to me). blame dar.

- keeping a daily journal so i can track my own personal feelings, insights, and experiences

- leaving a veritable breadcrumb trail of stickers of emo and cody's art along my path

- making up-to-date twitter and fb posts

- keeping a "regular" blog

So how am i doing so far? Well in terms of structure, unsurprisingly shitty. Although, i should've come to expect that. One of the reasons i was so excited about this trip was specifically because of it's lack of structure. So why the hell would i try to force it? I'm certainly not organized in my normal life, so there doesn't seem to be any reason to start changing while on vacation. The point of this trip was drop all responsibilities (as much as that's possible anyway, we've all got bills to pay) and chill the fuck out with two of my best friends for an entire month in a region we've been wanting to return to since we got back (has it really been 7 years already?) In all seriousness this feels like the first real vacation i've had since that first trip in high-school. That's incredibly depressing.

Here's the solution that's dawned on me for all these "projects": fuck structure. I'll document what i can in a series of irregular essay-like blog posts. As long as i try to touch on a little bit of everything i set on to do, i should have well...something by the end.

As an intro to all of this here's some more bullet points pertaining to days 0 through 5 (because i know you love 'em):

-the fact there are no dönner shops in the US is a fucking travesty. the turks should receive some kind of international culinary arts award. OM NOM NOM

-if you want a trip lacking a proper itinerary prepare to deal with a lot of wasted time, but try not to ever think of it as-such.

-thom yorke was right, meeting people is easy (even if you're not a brilliant singer/songwriter/musical engineer from the UK)

-my alcohol tolerance is raising rapidly. ahead of schedule in fact

-soundtrack so far: bloc party, little boots, uffie, crystal castles, mum, spinto band, tommy guererro, marina and the diamonds, stereolab...

-favorite out-of-context product name so far: dick milche (dick milk) hahahahaha

-current meal: salami and cheese baguette and a can of mixery (bier+cola!)

-right now: zim's playing ff tactics advance 2, manni's watching black books, and i'm typing this inane blog post with my ipad and accompanying bt keyboard

-things you may have noticed so far: my love of parenthesis (and broken thought patterns), my disdain for capitol letters and their proper usage, superlatives and me are like this (*crosses fingers), i shaved my mustache

-things you should assume: i'm way over-teched out here, i'm a lush, i'm having metric shit-tons of fun and plan on that continuing

-múm's "yesterday was dramatic; today is ok" is quite possibly the greatest train-ride album of all fucking time

-hahahaahahahaha...dick milk....classic

Let's make this a conversation. What do you want to know?

Location:Landsberger Allee,Berlin,Germany