Skipping back to the feeling of being in the Tindermill, there is no word for this feeling in English that I know of. For me it involved a mixture of shame (that’s culturally relative) and just the human-ness of being horny and low-key boredom with a kind of non-committal leisure vibe: like a loose, long-standing arrangement to go play pool on a Wednesday night. You could go any time, and it just feels neat to know that you belong to the pool hall gang.
Friday, Flixbus
A bag of cashew nuts, and a cheese sandwich on the road from Hamburg to Berlin. Nick Drake on the headphones. I arrive in time for dinner at Parma in Wedding, where the owner, Phillipe, like most internationals currently living in Berlin, is an artist. But he’s also a restauranteur right now. Sporting a large, relaxed frizz-hairdo he drifts out to say hi to my friends, B & T, who are regulars. He’s wearing brown corduroy flares and a tracksuit top, half unzipped over a string singlet. Back home in New Zealand we call these singlets “wife-beaters”. I won’t go into that here, because it is serious and awful and this text is supposed to be light-hearted, yet tinged with melancholy.
Anyway. It, (the singlet) has a slight patch of stainy something on it, which I notice, and silently judge him about. But again, I don’t say anything because although I’m uptight about that stuff, I don’t want people to know that too much. I consider Berlin to be a very special case fashion-wise anyway, so when I see people there who are badly dressed, I just assume that this is on purpose, and they are actually so future-trend-forward that I can have no idea about the things that they know, ever. After dinner we go book shopping at Kultur Kaufhaus Dussmann, until we are politely asked by the sales clerk, with large dark shadows under his eyes, to please leave as it is five to midnight and we are the last people in the English Language section. I suddenly feel like my life is way richer than I ever expected it to be when I was a teenager in Auckland, longing to leave and see The World. We walk home and T convinces us to try this bar he has “found” in Wedding where, as he puts it Man kann ja hingehen, which is German for “if you have nothing better to do, and you find yourself around the corner, one Friday evening at 1 am-ish, if you felt like a drink, it’s kind of OK-ish. So we do and it turns out to be kind of OK-ish and the barman is a professional from Canada and has us on this Kraken stuff before you can bat an eyelash. I try flirting with him, because he is there and I remember I am single, but then I stop when I also realise I am old enough to be his aunty. My heart is not really in it, for reasons I shall endeavour to explain, soon. Saturday, Uckermark
We drive out into the Uckermark, the least populated area in the entire republic, to tank up on green and take Tilly the Terrier for walks. We swim in the lake where Frau Merkel also has her weekend dips. The sweet water is clear, and soft and clean. I enjoy paddling in the silty, sandy shallows, watching rainbow-striped fish flitting coyly in and out of the reeds. We titter about Frau M having to do her Arschbomben from a helicopter due to heightened security on this pond, and I marvel, not for the first time about the silly hilarity of some German words. B sits on our blanket and relaxes as Tilly snaps, guarding our phones from the midges. T is going for broke and has his legs out of his black jeans. Although I have known them for around ten years, it is the first time I have ever seen them naked. Both of T’s legs, that is. He has quite a good collection of tattoos, kind of all over the place and he seems to be in good repair, generally.
Good genes, I sigh to myself and sink down into the water so as to anchor my thighs under the sightline of all onlookers. My thighs have been the bane of my life since forever, but whatever. One is not allowed to do self-fat-shaming these days, as it is un-feministic and third-wave feminists will shame you, for being un-feminist. I want to tell them I was educated by a collective of "lesbian" (that was before LGBTQ+ nomenclature, so I want to be correct, at least linguistically, if not politically) she-wolves in the den of 1980s feminism, force-fed Barbara Kruger and Guerilla Girls for breakfast and Mary Wollstonecraft Shelley on toast for my dinner. But I'm also a flint-hearted member of the most apathetic generation ever, so, like, actually? Umm, whatever. And, also, let me be clear: I’m an aesthete and I defend my right to judge anything on aesthetic grounds. Especially, my own things. Anyway, I’m quietly swishing around on my knees in the water when a horde of pre-pubescent kids arrives, somewhat shattering the bucolic calm of it all. So we pop Tilly back into the Opel and B drives, quite fast, into Gerswalde to Cafe zum Löwen, an old Bauernhof, piled up with ultra-hip Berlin peeps and run by a collective of stylish and seriously kind Japanese women. I am so lulled by all the serenity, and the charmingly mismatched but somehow harmonious kitchenware, that I accidentally drink my first coffee in over a year and feel the high clear stone washing over me as only a clean coffee addict can feel it. Everything kind of hits at once and becomes perfectly, crystal clear. We leave the café and walk Tilly a bit more, for although she has short legs, she is blessed with the staying power of the perennially smaller-than-other-dogs, dog. She pants alongside us through the parched stubble fields as I tell T and B about my short-lived and somewhat tragic adventures in Tinderland. As both a long-term couple and UX designers, they are horrified and rabidly curious about the interface, the user experience and how it feels to be inside the Tindermill. I tell them about a kind of meta-conversation I had with an experienced user (once it was clear we were a complete mismatch) who initiated me into how to behave and what means what. And how simple it all really is. He said, it’s like kids on a playground. You show up, have a giggle, play or throw sand and run away and then you go home in time for tea. I relate this to T & B and we laugh like drains. It is, as they say, Totale Krass. Yeah, but it’s also just the way we live now, I think. Then I start to talk about the painful moment when I discover my ex-lover-who-I-still-love also on there, and the attendant overwhelming sadness when I realize he will never be served up as a potential match because I am over his viable match age-threshold, and as such am at the mercy of the algorhythm, who feels, (if I may be so bold as to attribute sentience to a line of code), that my best match will be men over 40, usually called Jens, who either play or drive a golf. Or both. So, this person whom-I-still-love-but-is-absent-from-my-life-right-now, is always just down the bottom of my feed, but just out of reach. He sits in the row of: “hey, cool and funny person, did you know these cool and funny FB friends of yours also use Tinder? How cool! And funny! Why don’t you contact them and see if they’d like to have cool fun using Tinder with you together!” I never thought I’d write these two words after each other with attendant punctuation, but here goes: Really?! Seriously?! Because I am still in mourning, I am way below the line of where a responsible Tinder user should be, namely, working with the playground analogy. In my tortuously self-involved pain state I am thinking only: What kind of twisted fucker thought this up? And, am I the only one who found this to be unbearable torture enough to have to delete my profile…despite the almost unlimited stalking potential? And, then; ugh, this reminds me of that song “Do you like Pinacolada”, and getting caught in the rain? Except for the end bit when it turns out that hilariously he’s been writing to his own girlfriend all along. She walks in and says (sings), Yes, I like Pinacolada, and getting caught in the rain, before they walk off together into the tropical sunset. Only instead of the sunset being real, I tell the story and I get really sad and have to walk off fast in the long green grass by myself and look to the east at Poland as the wind blows around us, on top of the hill we just climbed. Tilly is suddenly filled with smaller-than-other-dogs, dog-joy, she does a wriggle-sniff dance for me and that makes it almost better. But not much, because I still desperately love this person and I can’t say this to my friends because it’s just too much of a bummer on a gorgeous sunny Sunday in the countryside. Skipping back to the feeling of being in the Tindermill, there is no word for this feeling in English that I know of. For me it involved a mixture of shame (that’s culturally relative) and just the human-ness of being horny and low-key boredom with a kind of non-committal leisure vibe: like a loose, long-standing arrangement to go play pool on a Wednesday night. You could go any time, and it just feels neat to know that you belong to the pool hall gang. The reality is usually a little shabbier and less sparkly rainbow-coloured than your brain had told you it would be. You wake up the next day with a head full of bees and an uncomfortable bruise on your left hip. The feeling I just invented might be a sub-branch of the particular kind of horny boredom that precedes a bout of (award-winning feminist) porn. At least that’s how I usually come to be there. Sunday, A7 to Hamburg
A few cashew nut crumbs on the road from Berlin to Hamburg. Yo La Tengo on the headphones, sing My heart’s not in it. I think of my ex-lover on the trip home and wondered if he simply belongs to the cohort of extraordinary people who are in my life to stretch the edges of my OK, to show me new possibles. Possibly. Just one more thing to love about him I think as I delete my Tinder profile and message the genuinely nice person I’ve been seeing; I like you a lot,…but I just can’t do this anymore. He is hurt and pissed and wants to talk. I feel like the world’s worst asshole, because I know that feels like you are in hell being dragged backwards through a pile of crap. I guess it will feel like that for a while. I write; it’s just not fair…I’m still in love with someone else. At that, my display goes quiet. I can’t believe I just wrote those words instead of saying them. I wonder what I am more afraid of, as I lean my head onto the cool glass of the windows and watch the A7 churn to an end at the Hörnerkreisel; the risk of loving, or the risk of not being loved. Whichever it is, I just want to sleep for a very long time, and wake up and have it be all a dream. And this be my dream notebook.
Sooo, to end on an up note; I was just researching, (which is what I call a ten second google lookup) if I could nail this awesome domain name where I could write more funny but sadly true stories, because that’s what I feel moved to do right now. So, after my research I bought www.sorrybuttrue.com and put up a sign in case someone stumbles on it one day while researching the phrase “sorry but true” like I did. The best tweet I found on the hashtag “sorry, but true” but spelt with wrong grammar, because tweet, was this one: the fact my grandma buys one ply makes me love her a little less… #sorrybuttrue I just wanna say to you hashtag boy: Respect your Grandma. She birthed your Ma, who birthed you. Sorry, but true. Comments are closed.
|
